Hi there,

This is not a poll but I would like to obtain some feedback.

Over the past few months, I have bee getting repeated bugchecks in Windows XP. These now appears to be pointing to a hard disk failure.

Now, the disk in question is an SATA device which is about 2 years old. I already have other IDE drives which are much older but working fine.

The question for discussion is;

Which drive is more reliable, IDE or SATA?

I know, I could be very unlucky that the drive I have was just a one off faulty thing, but is that true.....

I would appreciate your comments.

Cheers,

Jimbo

English isn't my native idiom.
I think the best use for SATA disks is storage, mainly by the large cache capacity they have. For day-by-day purposes, OS disk, I think IDE it´s the cheapest and reliable option.

Two friends of mine got problems with SATA disks, but I had a lot with IDE, of course, on a long period of time.

well there is absoultely no difference in reliablitity. its just how the drive connects to the mobo. the drive is the difference, not the cable. but since sata is on almost every new hdd, the new hdd is better. but thats just b/c its a brand new drive, not the fact that its sata.

The interface itself (PATA or SATA or even SCSI) by itself doesn't affect reliability whatsoever. Some disks are just better built (like high end SCSI drives used in servers), but it also varies from one company to another,
from one model/design/series to another, from one batch to another... It's a bit "hit and miss".

Besides the obvious bad designs/bad batches/flawed drives we've seen (5 platter "deathstars", the old Fujitsu MPG series which were far worse than the IBMs but that nobody seemingly remembers, etc), most hard drives are pretty reliable. Gotta keep 'em decently cooled though, especially if in RAID.

Some people like to bash some companies, but most of the time it's from people who had a single drive fail on them or just bad luck, just anecdotal evidence in 99% of cases (or even fanboys bashing brands they don't like and pretending to have seen tons of bad ones from brand X). So you can hardly rely on anything you'll read on the web. I personally don't buy stuff from companies from which I've personally seen too drives go bad (in some cases I've seen full tri-walls of them).

the only company ive really heard alot of crap about is maxtor, so thats all i can say about brands. i have a maxtor, seagete, and hitachi. and none of them have given me any problems so far.

Speaking of anectodal evidence... And there's SOOOOOOOOO much WD-fanboy bashing of Maxtor out there... I've seen lots of maxtors, and haven't found them to fail more often than others at all. They're also used in a lot of other places than computers - I've seen 'em in xbox'es, various PVRs including echostar receivers and tivos, etc - and we don't hear about these failing in large batches much either, so I dare say it's unfounded for the most part.

But if we're starting to make recommendations... Personally, I'll buy just about anything except for WD as I've basically seen them fail in a noticeably larger percentage than pretty much every other brand (and we've got many thousands of HDs in use at work). Currently buying Seagate and Samsung drives for the most part.

Well,

It looks like a bag of worms has been dug up! Lots of interesting comments.

Thanks for all of your comments. I will take them on board.

I am just an end user and have not seen volumes of pc's. In fact, I was a hd failure vergin. Even through friends and work, I have not seen a failure. So the first one would have to be mine!

Ho Hummmmm.

The SATA interface cabling is less shielded and operates at a higher frequency than PATA cabling, so it is more vulnerable to EMI and RFI.

That's why I wrapped my SATA cables in aluminium foil and grounded it to the case

WOH!

Shielded & grounded SATA cables!

Is that really necessary?

I fly radio controlled aircraft and know that when there are very long cable runs between the servo and the receiver, the long run acts as an aerial picking up interference, then a toroidal coil (a magnetic ring where the cable is wound through about 4 times) is needed at the receiver end to deflect unwanted RFI pickup but did not think that this would be necessary within a pc case.

The mechanical parts of a SATA drive are essentially the same as an IDE drive. So, mechanicly they should last the same length of time.

Only the interface is different.

I had four WD sata drives fail on me last summer. NO MORE WD drives here, thank you.
I've replaced the last one with a 160 gig Maxtor SATA drive and had no more problems.
SATA is much faster than IDE and should be used as the OS drive if you have any option.

A Ghost bakup of my C: drive used to take me over a half hour with my old IDE drive, now it only takes me five minutes with my new SATA drive. SATA ROCKS!
If you have access to a SATA drive and you're not using it for your OS, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

I'm even using my old IDE drive, a 60 gig Maxtor, on my second SATA port on my mobo, with a little IDE to SATA dongle. It now transfers data at over 1000mbpm. It's all in the interface. IDE controllers on the mobo are just plain SLOW.

Go for the Gusto! GO SATA!

Andromeda43

Hey!

Didn't know there was an IDE to SATA dongle. I will have to investigate.

Thanks.

The mobo and other components in the case emit RFI... toroids wouldn't work too well as the frequencies used by the SATA interface would be attenuated by them. Shielding is the best method.

http://www.ata-atapi.com/sata.htm This article is old, maybe they've fixed some of the problems now as I've started to see shielded SATA cables being sold.

That's less likely to do with SATA. Sounds like the other HDD just wasn't as fast.

As has been mentioned several times, it obviously needs repeating for the poster above who mentioned "Sata is faster..."

A SATA drive is not faster than an equal IDE drive under any circumstances. You can purchase identical Western Digital 250GB 8mb cache 7200RPM drives in both SATA and IDE form. And when benchmarked, they perform identically.

The only reason that a SATA drive would be faster than an IDE drive is if the internal mechanicals are faster on the SATA drive. And since SATA is a new standard, you find it only on new drives -- newer drives obviously will be employing newer spindle speeds, platter densities and drive head technologies versus drives that are older.

That doesn't mean SATA is faster, it means the underlying technology that actually enables the drive to read and write data is faster.