SATA150 or ATA100

[obg]

I'm going to order a new laptop and my options are to get SATA150 at 5400rpm or ATA100 at 7200rpm. I'm also going to get this with RAID 0 enabled. I'm not sure about the other specifics of the drives, but based on the specs above, which would you order and why?

My main use for the laptop will be running structural analyses. These programs write large chunks of data to the drives.

TIA

 

[BW86]

i would get the ata100, faster HDD's and sata isnt that much better than pata at the moment. Does the sata cost more?

 

[JBT]

Go with the ATA 100, 7200 RPM, the SATA150 won't help at all because no drives have the performance high enough esspecially not a 5400 rpm drive.

 

[obg]

I'm not sure of the cost yet. This new model won't be available to order until tomorrow.

Thanks for the recommendation. I suspected the 7200 rpm drives would be better, but wasn't sure.

I did ask and when the faster SATA drives become available, I'll only need to purchase a new cable to upgrade.

 

[dnoyeb]

SATA is just the interface technology, the drives and data speed is totally seperate technology. Thus fast SATA drives will be available at the same time as fast PATA drives. YOu gotta read the drives stats about data throughput and forget burst speed, focus on average speed.

 

[Thor86]

I have both (same rpm) and they are about the same in real world performance.

 

[JaRb0y]

there is power consumption differences though, ATA ~5V vs SATA ~250mV thats where the SATA drive has the advantage

 

[obg]

I got my new laptop with the dual 7200rpm PATA drives ,RAID 0.

Since the system has been released one of the resellers is posting benchmarks which show the dual SATA drives as being faster. They used PCMark04 and HDTach for the benchmarks.

Does this make sense? Do these benchmarks represents real world performance?

Overall, I'm really liking this laptop. It is the first one that I consider a true DTR.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Originally posted by: JaRb0y
there is power consumption differences though, ATA ~5V vs SATA ~250mV thats where the SATA drive has the advantage

Don't spread BS here. A SATA drive will draw the same amount of power compared to a similar PATA drive since both drives are still very much the same.

 

[Algere]

Originally posted by: StrangerGuy

Originally posted by: JaRb0y
there is power consumption differences though, ATA ~5V vs SATA ~250mV thats where the SATA drive has the advantage

Don't spread BS here. A SATA drive will draw the same amount of power compared to a similar PATA drive since both drives are still very much the same.

He's talking about the signaling voltage (data cable) ergo no BS.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ironically, either way you slice it, SATA drives actually take *more* power than their equivalent PATA counterparts. So you're both wrong.

I'm actually quite surprised that they are even offering laptops with SATA technology. It can't be because of the power-consumption, and the way that most laptops are designed, the cabling isn't much an an issue either. Must be marketing. (SATA = newer, must be better!)

 

[dejunjing]

One important for overclocker: the cables of SATA drive is much much neater, not blocking your airflow.

 

[obg]

I've also noticed that they're saying the SATA drives use much less CPU than the PATA.

It's still hard for me to believe the 5400rpm SATA drives are running better than the 7200rpm PATA drives. Do the benchmarks consider the CPU time?

 

[Jeff7]

I'm actually quite surprised that they are even offering laptops with SATA technology. It can't be because of the power-consumption, and the way that most laptops are designed, the cabling isn't much an an issue either. Must be marketing. (SATA = newer, must be better!)

These are also 7200rpm drives, so it looks like this laptop wasn't made with power consumption in mind.

Originally posted by: dejunjing
One important for overclocker: the cables of SATA drive is much much neater, not blocking your airflow.

It's for a laptop.

The drives - get the 7200rpm thing. That'll make way more difference than any marginal gains the SATA would (not) provide. A laptop will probably never even allow for the 100MB/sec burst speed anyway. The laptops I've seen don't seem to have the greatest IDE controllers.

 

[obg]

Here are some numbers from Sandra 2004 without the windows cache enabled.

Again, there are 2 - 60GB 7200rpm PATA drives with RAID 0.

File system Benchmark (without Windows file cache):
Drive Index:
46MB/s
Buffered Read:
89MB/s
Sequential Read:
67MB/s
Random Read:
18MB/s
Average Access Time:
39ms(est.)

So it looks like it's getting close to the 100MB/sec bandwidth for the buffered read.

 

[BadThad]

When it comes down to it, the rotational speed (then cache) ownz anything else on a hard drive. On a desktop I prefer SATA because the cables are much neater and easier to deal with. On a laptop that's not a consideration so I'd go for rotational speed.