serial ATA drives

[philip_sweeney]

Preparing to upgrade computer. I intend to get a MB with serial ATA

and install the OS on a serial ATA drive. With my existing 7200rpm IDE

hard drives, is there any benefit to getting the parallel to serial

ATA PCI cards versus running them on IDE?

[s._fisher]

The only real advantage of Serial ATA right now are smaller cables so it doesn't really matter what you do.

[scott_eaton]

Serial ATA has one very positive benefit. It insures you'll get the latest technology hard-drives and controllers. Basically the new SATA spec filters out a lot of the garbage that is available on current IDE systems, and man, there is a lot of it.

 

Performance wise, what Mr. fisher said. The best IDE HD's and controllers pretty much behave the same as SATA.

[steven_clark]

Which means give it 4 months for the taiwanese to ramp up production and the SATA market will be flooded with trash drives and controllers.

[scott_eaton]

So true.

 

I think we're safe with HD's, but with the trend going towards super cheap motherboards with two-cent integrated drive controllers I'm not surprised we'll see our share of junk. I'm already seeing this trend with integrated server based SCSI controllers.

[ross_frid]

I have a Dell workstation with 80 Gig EIDE drive and a SIIG SATA controller with Seagate Barracuda 120 Gig SATA drive. The SATA drive wants to go to sleep every so often and I cannot raise it from slumber unless I reinstall the SIIG drivers! I'm not convinced this is "ready for prime time" yet.

[thorondorwest]

There are a couple of benefits to SATA that are being overlooked here. With good old IDE, only one device on a bus can access that bust at any given time. IE if you are burning a CD and that drive is on the same physical connection as the hard drive on which the data resides, your computer is forced to switch between the CD drive and the hard drive constantly. This is why most CD burners come with installation instructions indicating that it should be installed on a different physical IDE channel than your system drive. SATA does not suffer from this limitation. If the motherboard you are purchasing has true SATA support (some come with a chip that basically translates it to regular ATA i.e. IDE) then you are bypassing the PCI bus when running your hard drives, which is a very good thing. Due to the fact that the PCI bus only runs at 33mhzx32bits (not a lot of bandwidth by todays standards) the more devices you can remove from this channel the better your overall system performance should be.

 

The only benefit I could see from running your drives on an add-on card would be if it supports a RAID 0 setup (disk striping w/o parity) as that will greatly increase the maximum transfer rate of your drive, at the expense of some latency.

 

I hope I have helped awnser your question, if it is too muddy - let me know what is unclear to you and I will attempt to explain it a bit better.

 

My $0.02

[chris_hill3]

Well- I have an issue similar to the original. I have a Gigabyte 8IK1100 mobo, but the Barracuda SATA drive works- the master disk. However, when I go to plug a normal IDE drive in as pr. slave, the BIOS does not detect the IDE disk. Jumper on the IDE is set to slave (SATA drive is jumperless). I also have 2 IDE devices- DVD-R and DVD-ROM set up as well. These are seen without an issue with the SATA drive.

 

The SATA controller on the board has an option where it can route the device into an IDE channel. The controller has two device options. I'm only using one obviously. However, when the device is routed to the primary master (as I want), the primary slave SATA path is automatically routed to the second SATA slot...not what I want. There is no way around this.

 

Does anyone have an idea how I could get the IDE HDD and the SATA drive talking?

 

Appreciated,

Chris