I have upgraded to a Mobo that has SATA ports (Abit IS7-e). Had anyone used / seen this new Western Digital Raptor Hard drive in action? I have read mix reviews that this drive is more / better for servers and not desktops / game playing. I am currently running there WD 120G with the 8mb Cashe.

I am just looking for info if the new 865 chipset will be faster with me moving to a hard drive on the ATA ports VS my current IDE port. I am not going to get into raid. Just looking to maybe get this drive and install the OS and turn the 120G into data storage.

Are there plans to come out with a bigger ATA drive / are people have problems with getting ATA drive to run?

THanks for any help

SNuts

No experience but certainly an interest in the developments of SATA; (particularly the length of the cabling and the hot-swapability).

A 35G HDD doesn't sound particularly "Server Hardware" even if 10k RPM. WD also do a SATA 350G HDD at 10K.

You could also utilise your current 120G WD ATA by attaching a SATA converter to the IDE port on the drive and then run one of the nice narrow cables from it to the SATA port on the mobo.

eg: http://www.addonics.com/interface_solutions/sata.asp

I have two of the Raptors set up in a RAID-0 array on an Asus I865PE board. Very easy to set up. I use them for my OS, programs and games.
I use an 80 Gig WD 8Mb for storage, temp files, and swap. Works nicely this way.

The cables are nice. Need a S-ATA power cable converter as power supplies with S-ATA connections are just now slowly coming to the market. There are many 7200 rpm S-ATA drives available from the big manufacturers. This is still first generation S-ATA and the hot swapping is not there just yet.

I am pleased with this interface and eagerly await the next generation of S-ATA drives, which should have higher transfer rates and support hot swapping.

If you can spare the money, go for it. If not, and they are pricy for 36 Gigs of space, look into the 7200 rpm offerings from WD, Maxtor, IBM.:)

Abit was nice enough to include both a data cable and a power cable / adapter for the new drives.

If I hook up my current IDE drive to that adapter for the ATA port, will WD drive be able to take advantage of the ATA data transfer?