Hello there. I'm thinking of getting a sata drive to replace my ata drive as the primary os drive. However a friend of mine keeps telling me that he hates sata(especially maxtor drives). He claims that they are less reliable, and that they are harder to recover data from once they fail.

What are your thoughts on it? Is the performance increase on a sata drive noticeable? Are there any brands that you guys like?

Right now I have a 2.4 P4 machine w/ a gig of pc3200 ram, 200gig ata 7200rpm drive. I've already ordered a 3.2E P4 and am thinking about a new hardrive!

Seagate Baraccuda series SATA HDDs come with a 5 year warrantee. I use them. No problems.

Performance increase over IDE for SATA 150 is minor, but that's not the only selling point.

ATA/IDE is say at 133 while SATA 150 is...well, 150. That a little over 12% performance increase, if you get it all. Simplicity is another thing I like--dedicated channels, no more master/slave crap, no sharing, no jumpers to set, Smaller, neater cables. Just plain better.

If you're considering a SATA HDD, make sure your mobo will support it.

I would say go SATA every time if your mobo supports them. I started off with a couple of WD Raptors and just love them. I find the performance increase almost palpable - even with other lower spec SATAs running at 7200rpm. I don't think data recovery is a real issue. OK so one needs a BIOS that can see the SATAs but that apart I think it is a non-issue. The main thing about recovery is to avoid it in the first place by having a sensible backup routine.

Just to clarify...by all means, if your mobo supports SATA, go with that. I think the IDE/ATA is on its way out like AGP, especially now that SATA optical drives are becoming available.