should I look for SATA?

[andreadebiase]

I need a clarification.
I was looking at fast hard drives and noticed that there are some which spin at 10,000 rpms (scsi exluded). Interestingly i also noticed that these kind of hard drives which are called SATA require a new kind of cable and thus a SATA conncetor on the mobo.
Anyway, I don`t really have a question but i would like to know if I got this SATA thing right. Am I missing anything else? is SATA the new "way to go" for hard drives? they seem affordable contrary to scsi.........

Oh and one more thing: how do you compare in terms of speed a "normal" hard drive against a SATA hard drive if both spin at 7200rpm? is the S(erial)ATA faster regardless of the rpm?

[Budfred]

SATA is becoming the standard for hard drives, but it will be a while before they reach that point. You can get PCI adapter cards to use them now. I don't think at 7200rpm that they are any faster than an IDE drive, but I am not sure about that. If they have a bigger cache, that might make them faster even if the access speed is the same....

[HeadachesAbound]

You can get a mobo that has both SATA and IDE Support. You can also get a SATA Drive for about $20 more than a regular IDE. SATA is the new way to go but I'm not sure just how much faster they might be than a standard IDE.

I recently priced out a system which I am selling for around $1500 which includes a 120GB HD with 8MB Cache and runs at 7200RPM.

Gigabyte GA-7N400PRO2
CHIEFTEC Black Server Chasis w/450Watt Foxconn Power Supply
AMD ATHLON XP 2600 /333 FSB PROCESSOR CPU w/ HSF/Fan
1 GB PC2700 Kingston DDR RAM (2*512MB)
Lite On Black 48x24x48x16 CDROM/CDRW/DVD Combo Drive LTC-48161H
Sony Black 3.5 Floppy
Seagate 120GB 7200RPM 8M SATA Hard Drive
SAPPHIRE ATI RADEON 9200 SE 128MB DDR TV-out 8X AGP
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 - PCI
Win 2K (or XP Pro)

[iisbob]

It's not so much about the drive thats faster ( tho 10k rpm ceraintly allows faster read/write than 7200k rpm), but the interface which makes the difference; old IDE drives , or PATA relied upon parallel data transfers with 1 data wire paired with 1 ground wire, then they introduced UDMA and a drive that could send data faster than the cable media could handle; hence the 80 wire cables that now gave 2 ground wires per data wire to help alleviate the EM noise. But even with that 133 MB's per sec is the upper limit of PATA data transfer-so they came out with the new SATA ( or Serial ) data transfer that starts at 150 MB's and promises to go above 1 GB within a years time; and doesn't require all the extra cabling since it uses a different signaling method.

SerialATA.org (www.serialata.org) offers the technical briefs if you're interested in further study.

Briefly, it's to the IDE interface what PCI was to ISA.

[saphalline]

If you don't already have SATA built into your motherboard, then don't get it! It's not worth it yet. SATA hard drives have similar enough drive electronics that the performance ends up being the same.

Stick to the 7200rpm drives, but go for cache size and GB's instead of worrying about SATA. I'm partial to the Western Digital "JB" drives personally, but any other ATA hard drive with 8MB of cache will work quite well for you.

[andreadebiase]

Well, is see that there is a mix of feelings here on wheather they are faster or not. These Sata drives come with 8Mb of buffer as a standard and they spin at 7200rpm like the non-Sata ones...fine but to this you have to add the fact that SATA talks at 150Mb/s compare to the usual 100 or the latest 133 and add to this the 10,000 option that is not available for the other drives (unless SCSI). How come they are not faster?

[iisbob]

If you don't already have SATA built into your motherboard, then don't get it! It's not worth it yet

Um, i'll have to disagree-i can see a major performance difference between my new Raptor 10k SATA drives & my older U133 ones.

Between the 7200k drives, maybe there is not much difference; but still you have to concede that a drive that bursts data up to only 133 MB's persec compared to one that transfers at sustained 150MB's persec is not at all having the same comparable performance.

andreadebiase if you need storage over speed; and price is a factor then the PATA ATA133 drives are still a bette deal than SATA at the moment; but if you're going to build a new system-why not go ahead and spend the little extra it costs to get a newer, more advanced piece of hardware?

[Paul Komski]

I fully concur with iisbob and love the 10k Raptors. The neat cables and potential for hot-plugging are other nice non-performance aspects.

As good or better performance leap as when getting the first 7.2k PATAs.

[rond36]

I think S-ATA is the drive interface of the future.

Intel and Supermicro are selling highend workstation and server motherboards with S-ATA RAID instead of SCSI RAID and 3ware is selling 4, 8, and 12 port PCI-X 64 bit 66 MHz S-ATA RAID cards to be used on P4 Xeon DP workstation and server motherboards that support PCI-X (PCI 2.2).

[saphalline]

I certainly wasn't saying that SATA wasn't worth it for a new PC, but andreadebiase never said anything about building a new PC. For a new PC, yes, it's nearly impossible to ignore SATA built into the latest mobo's (I have it), but if you have an older PC it's isn't going to do a bit of good. A PCI SATA card will be just like an ATA connection because the PCI interface is limited to 133MBps. Total!

Also, it's not true that a 7200rpm hard drive with 8MB of cache is going to perform incredibly better than the same drive on a PATA interface. Drive electronics are currently limiting hard drive performance, not the interface. There is no hard drive in the world that can keep up with SATA's 150MBps sustained transfer rate. Not yet anyway.

SATA's interface in general is superior on many levels, not the least of which is the 150MBps transfer rate doled out for each device vs PATA's slightly slower 100MBps or 133MBps for both devices on a chain. But to compare the 10K rpm Raptor drive to a 7200rpm PATA drive is simply unfair. That's as bad as comparing a Mac to my PC! :D :p

So again, I give my advice.

If you don't already have SATA built into your motherboard or are building a new PC (should have been my out in the first place) then it's not worth it yet.

I hold steadfast to my advice because I give it out of practicality, not because of my lack of knowledge on the subject.