Pros and cons with a computer that uses IDE only components or SATA components meaning both hard drives and disk drives. I am considering switching to SATA only PC

sata is better than ide for hdds. for disk drives it really depends on the drive, some are not mature yet and the bios may not detect them, so you cant boot off of it. so i guess do some research before you buy one.

Clinging to IDE is like clinging to 5¼" floppies. There's no point. It's old technology, it's not properly adapted to modern needs and it's being phased out.

Anyone who choose to continue purchasing new parts based on IDE is wasting their money.

sata is way to go. better aerodynamics because of cables.

Aren't transfer rates far more superior with Sata? and what 's the diff between Sata and SataII?

Transfer rates are superior for hard drives, not for CD/DVD-RW.

For HDDs:

People often think SATA = 1.5 Gb/sec and SATAII = 3.0 Gb/sec, but this is not true. SATAII is the name of an organization that developed the standard. Yes, SATAII is newer than SATAI and may have better speed but not twice the speed.

If you're looking for a 3.0 Gb/sec HDD, make sure it says so on box; don't just look for SATAII.

If you go directly to Maxtor or Wester Digital site, they don't used SATAII designation; they use 1.5 Gb/sec or 3.0 Gb/sec.

More details here:

http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp

And a little more explenation in this thread:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=95967

well the raptor is sataI and is faster than basically every sataII drive
but you forgot to say what the definition really is. its the max transfer rate that could be possible by that type of connection. its all about the type of connection, not the drive. just like that max speed of ide 66, 100, or 133. sataI max is 150. and sataII max is 300. but since drives only have an average transfer rate of ~65 ill say, it really doesnt matter.

*smacks you*

There is no such thing as SATA I or SATA II.

and why not!? how am i suppose to classify it then? im just pointing out how actual speed is basically the same.

You classify them by 1.5Gb/s and 3.0Gb/s.

You're right that sustained transfer speeds will typically be the same, since it's not the bottleneck right now.

Another advantage with SATA is that you've always got just one device per channel. On PATA, you can have two devices share the same channel.

This was just discussed not even two posts before yours.

And I quote from the official website for SATA (http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp):

There are no "versions" of SATA. There is simply SATA. There is no such thing as SATA I or SATA II even though a whackload of companies use them. SATA is SATA, period.

What changes is which features they support. A so-called (wrongly named) SATA II drive may not even support 3.0Gb/s, it doesn't have to. It only has to support the SATA protocol, what it supports after that is up to the manufacturer of both the chipset and the drive.

SATA devices (both the controller and the drive) can support either 1.5Gb/s OR 3.0Gb/s using the SATA protocol. The following features are OPTIONAL and may or may not be supported regardless of the transfer speed:

• Asynchronous Notification
• ClickConnect
• eSATA
• Hot Plug
• Link Power Management
• Native Command Queuing (NCQ)
• Staggered Spin-Up
• xSATA

This is why you will find SATA drives that are 3.0Gb/s but do NOT support Hot Plug or NCQ, but you can find SATA drives that are 1.5Gb/s and DO support Hot Plug and NCQ.

You really should read the information on the SATA-IO site that both jcarle and I have linked for you. The max transfer rate is NOT the definition of a SATA "II" drive (remember, there's no such thing as SATA I or SATA II...only SATA).

"SATA II" is only used as a marketing term...it has no real meaning. If you look at the features supported between so called "SATA II" drives you'll probably see a lot of differences in the supported SATA features.

The Raptor drives are faster because of the faster spindle speed, as well as supporting nearly all of the technologies outlined by the SATA II members.

ya and im just pointing that out. when ppl think that sataII is faster than sataI, its not true. b/c the raptor is sataI.

Again, there is no such thing as SATA II or SATA I. You just don't get it, do you.

As of now, the **only** thing you get from SATA vs IDE/PATA is narrower cables inside of your PC. If you have more than one drive, you'll actually have MORE SATA cables than PATA which may well negate any cooling advantage of the smaller SATA cables.

In addition to the raw speed calculations, PATA just happens to be MORE reliable than SATA. Why? Because IDE/PATA implements error correction in the hardware/chipset independantly of the CPU and OS. Remember that the whole rationale for SATA is that it's supposed to be cheaper than PATA. As such, one of the 'cheaper' things is that error correction occurs in the device driver, OS, and CPU.

SATA running at 3 Gbit/sec is nominally no faster than PATA running at 133 MBYTE/sec. Do the maths. And then look up the 'cheaper' side of SATA and compare it to what PATA does in hardware.

No contest.

You have no real understanding of anything you just wrote.

well guys, I know that my ST3250620AS have 1.5 or 3.0....I've removed the jumper for 3.0 speed....noticed the transfer rate is much better however I highly doubt I'm able to transfer 3GB/sec

It's to be expected. 3Gb/s is the interface transfer limit. The actual transfer rate is entirely limited to your hard drive's capability, which in your case is 300Mb/s.

that good? LOL...i've no idea. I've just recently hooked up Sata and have no clue ....

if memory serves me correctly, I remember that my IDE Drive Maxtor 160GB had a transfer rate I believe was 92MB/s at best

So address the disputed points instead of pretending to be all guru-ish......

I daresay that I've probably implemented far more petabytes of storage than you using a far wider variety of technologies.

Disputed points? You didn't even make any valid points. As for your storage implementations, I doubt that. None the less, I'm going to illustrate the vast differences below.

To start, the ATA standard is out-dated. The standard was established in 1986 and was simply revised over and over again to try to keep up to date. The last revision was in 2001 which is 6 years ago. The SATA standard was established in 2003. It's fairly obvious that a standard created within the last 4 years is going to be much more capable and much more adaptable to modern needs then one made over 20 years ago.

The ATA standard has not been revised since 2001 because it is impossible, at this time, using that standard, to exceed the limitations of 133MB/s. The limitations are due to signal timings, electromagnetic interference and data integrity. Something that simply cannot be fixed with a revision of the standard. As modern data throughput increases, ATA simply cannot keep up without creating bottlenecks.

ATA being parallel in nature is also limited to 16-bit. SATA does not have this limitation as it uses 1-bit data signaling.

There is the obvious advantages of smaller cables being used for SATA. Although an single IDE cable can be used to connect two IDE devices, two SATA cables are still smaller then a single IDE cable.

There is also a difference in the supported length for each standard's cables. ATA can sustain IDE cables up to 18 inches. SATA can sustain up to 40 inch cables.

Data transmission power consumption is also reduced. ATA uses sixteen 5V data signals, SATA uses a single 250mV data signal.

ATA is not hot-swappable without special hardware. SATA is hot-swappable.

ATA cannot exceed 133MB/s burst transfer rates. SATA can sustain up to 300MB/s continuous transfer rates.

SATA supports better power management as SATA devices can use 3.3V as well as the typical 12V and 5V found in ATA devices.

SATA natively supports AHCI which ATA cannot support.

SATA supports NCQ, ATA does not.

And by the way, your only argument for ATA, the one about error correction is false. SATA uses CRC error correction to verify data packets, the same method that ATA uses. SATA takes a step up above ATA though since not only does it verify data packets like ATA does, it also uses CRC data verification on command and status packets, which ATA does not do.

There is simply no reason not to choose SATA over ATA, unless the person is, like yourself, completely misinformed.

jcarle is totally right here, but there's more to it:

-Pricing: if you look at new HDs at several stores, you'll see the PATA versions are often more expensive than the faster SATA one (like this vs this). Even if the difference isn't huge (still 40$ more for the PATA version of the Seagate 750GB vs the SATA), why pay more for older, lesser, slower parts?

-Availability: just look at the manufacturers' lineups for each interface. They're starting to have less PATA models and more SATA ones unsurprisingly. This is only going to get worse. Soon enough, your choices for buying PATA drives will be pretty minimal. Even DVD burners are making the switch now.

-New chipsets, and motherboards that use 'em: Not only new motherboards are starting to get a bunch more SATA ports and often only one PATA connector, but lots of new chipsets like Intel's 965 don't even have a PATA/IDE port built-in anymore! So they have to rely on other 3rd party chips to add one if they want to have one. Performance isn't always great, and dependign on which controller they pick the drivers sometimes suck. Case in point: some of them are using PATA-to-USB bridges for that like the JMicron JMB20335 (you can't even install your OS on the PATA ports or boot from them in this case e.g. the MSI G965M-FI). Soon enough we'll see motherboards without any PATA connectors at all.

-Reliability: SATA is good enough that lots of large companies (who need speed and reliability) are moving from expensive SCSI RAID setups to SATA RAID to save costs. The drives are almost as reliable as their SCSI counterparts but much cheaper. And the speeds are quit good too. There's some very nice SATA RAID cards out there (with staggered spin-up, hotswap, NCQ and all) like the Areca series. It's more reliable than IDE.

Buying SATA is future-proofing. You get better, faster stuff for cheaper, from a larger selection. Smaller cables... It's better all-around.

The ONLY reason to buy PATA drives is the need to support "legacy" systems.

I doubt it...

SCSI
SCSI RAID
SATA
SATA RAID
SAS RAID using SAS drives
SAS RAID using SATA drives
SAS RAID using both SAS and SATA drives on a single controller (yes, it can be done)
Fiber Channel using FC drives

My most recent being the Fiber Channel with thirty 146GB 15K RPM 4Gb/s fiber channel drives.


It's a no contest choice between PATA and SATA drives. SATA wins every time. To be honest, SATA drives are surprisingly fast on the right SAS RAID controller. You'll never get a PATA setup to be that fast.

holy crap, I feel like i'm in the 3'rd grade but with super geeks from hell...

...my take on all this

for the average user, there is no difference, except that sata is much easier to install as the plugs are nicer

if you are some power user who's with raid what not and all that, then sata gives greater bandwidth overall...however the sata drives and ide drives mechnically are very simular and I highly doubt someone using a computer could tell the difference between the too without running benchmarks proving one is better than the other...

In short, in my opinion the answer the original posters question could be something like

Well, in reality there isn't much of a difference, however, most things are sata nowadays, sata products (well harddrives) are generally cheaper, cd/dvd drives are avaliable, overall my self i'd always go for sata unless you specifically need ide, for example some motherboards have onboard raid but only for IDE in that case if you wanted raid get IDE drives, but since that doesn't apply here thats meaningless

P.s. i have not installed 100's of harddrives of any sort, however I have researched these things before when I was decideding weather or not to get sata in the past, but i'm capable of being able to suggest things for someone who wants to build a computer, not google's next data centre...

There's a very simple thing you can try which will show you the difference between IDE and SATA and how SATA is yards better then IDE.

Put a hard drive as the primary master on an IDE cable then an 18x capable DVD+/-RW drive as the primary slave on the same cable. Now try to burn a full 4.7GB DVD-R at 18X from the hard drive. Chances are you'll end up with buffer underruns, maybe even a coaster.

Or try putting two IDE hard drives on the same IDE cable and copy a large multi-GB file between the two hard drives and see how long it takes.

Do the same with SATA hardware and you'll have none of those issues.

^^ I like that explanation! Nice n simple! but straight to the point

I never put a CD/DVD Drive as a Slave on the same IDE Channel.

I have my HardDrives On IDE0
and my cd/dvd drives on IDE1

My Main Drive as Master and a Backup Drive as Slave
My CD Player as Primary Secondary and my CD/DVD Burner as Slave Secondary.

I learned from experience I can get faster response times by doing this as supposed to my Main Drive As Master Primary and my Burner as Slave Primary etc.



Quite honestly, IDE0 is redundant to me now as I've finally switched to Sata! (yay!)

What you just explained goes on to support what I said. With SATA you simply don't have to take even the time to think about things like that.

We can see it in two ways :

Normal users :
If you want to add a PATA HDD into your system, before you do that, you have to find out what is primary master, primary slave, secondary master and secondary slave otherwise most likely you will not be able to see your new HDD.
If you want to add a SATA HDD, just connect the cables and start the computer, that's it.

Pro users :
PATA, you can only have 4 devices which inluded HDD and CD-Rom and your case becomes "Warm" already.
SATA, Max. you can have 127 devices(ideal) and which suppose will not affect to each other (when you want to burn an image from HDD to DVD-R).


Will this be easier to explain???

That is incorrect.

IDE supports 2 devices per channel. SATA supports 1 device per channel. There is no limit to the number of channels that can be used. You could have 200 IDE channels and you could have 200 SATA channels. The only limit is in the chip designs and motherboard layouts.

Interesting, so since I only have 2 sata ports, I can only have 2 sata drives running.....

Been reading this thread and learning alot....thanks OP

I do have a question concerning my own rig and how to improve upon it.

Mobo - Gigabyte GA-945P-S3 rev 1.0

I have one SATA HDD, and one IDE HDD and CDROM.

The SATA is used as the primary boot drive.

Financially I can't afford getting another SATA drive for a while, but I was thinking about getting an IDE to SATA converter for my other HDD and possibly for my CDROM (not sure if they make them tho).

If I do that, will I see any increased performance since I'm going all SATA?

I'm a little confused about my mobo settings. WinXP shows the Intel SATA Drivers in the Device Manager and I think I'm getting a good transfer rate from my SATA Drive, but I don't want to slow my system down by mixing IDE and SATA drives if by going all SATA (even with converters that I know slow down transfer rates) I can increase performance by turning off the IDE channels in the bios.

If my post doesn't make sense, its probably because I need more coffee.....

Thanks in advance for advice/help.


T

If you do a lot of file transfers between the SATA and PATA drive then you'll probabaly see a slight performance increase. You may also notice a slight increase with CD burning (even if you leave it on the PATA controller with both drives on the SATA controller). At the very least there would be less of a chance of coaster making.

Other than that you probably won't notice much...other than having better air flow, which will result in a cooler running system.

Using an IDE to SATA converter for your hard drive would be to your advantage since it would allow your CD-Rom to be by itself on the IDE cable. Two devices on the same IDE cable will always cause bottlenecks, it native to the technology. I wouldn't advise using the converter for the CD-Rom at the moment, even if it would work, as SATA ATAPI protocols are still unstable.