[jimbo385]

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

[deda]

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.

[ripken204]

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.

[CoffeeFiend]

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).

[ripken204]

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.

[CoffeeFiend]

ripken204, on Sep 13 2006, 10:08 PM, said:

the only company ive really heard alot of crap about is maxtor, so thats all i can say about brands.

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.

[jimbo385]

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.

[LLXX]

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.

[nitroshift]

LLXX, on Sep 14 2006, 08:10 AM, said:

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

[jimbo385]

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.

[Andromeda43]

jimbo385, on Sep 13 2006, 07:17 PM, said:

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

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

[jimbo385]

Hey!

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

Thanks.

[LLXX]

jimbo385, on Sep 14 2006, 09:45 AM, said:

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 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.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Andromeda43, on Sep 14 2006, 11:17 AM, said:

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!

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

[Albuquerque]

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.

[rickytheanuj]

I have so many bad experiences with SATA believe me when I was a kid just learning the computer hardware , that time i haven't seen any IDE HDD which is damaged even I am still using a old 40 GB of IDE HDD which is still working fine without any failure but now a days I have the collection of damaged SATA HDD, my friends' sata HDD is damaged so many times. even I bought a 160GB of sata HDD which is hardly worked till 1 and half year and crashed.. when i run windows with sata HDD it sounds like "kir.. kir..rrrrr" which i think the major problem of HDD

[jaclaz]

rickytheanuj, on 04 August 2010 - 02:58 AM, said:

I have so many bad experiences with SATA believe me when I was a kid just learning the computer hardware , that time i haven't seen any IDE HDD which is damaged even I am still using a old 40 GB of IDE HDD which is still working fine without any failure but now a days I have the collection of damaged SATA HDD, my friends' sata HDD is damaged so many times. even I bought a 160GB of sata HDD which is hardly worked till 1 and half year and crashed.. when i run windows with sata HDD it sounds like "kir.. kir..rrrrr" which i think the major problem of HDD

And, again, the interface has NOTHING to do with reliability of a drive.
Design, actual manufacturing methods (please read as lowering costs) and mainly EVER INCREASING DENSITY of the data are to be blamed.

Most modern hard disks have on a SINGLE platter 500 Gb or more of data.

Since form factor remained fixed, the surface where the recording is actually stored is the same of, say a 20 Gb hard disk of a few years ago.

Tolerances, precision of movements, stability, etc, has to be at least ten to thirty times smaller.

A misalignment 1/10th or 1/30th the size of the one that could barely cause a problem on an "oldish" drive now it's catastrophic.

Anyone old enough to remember the "bigfoot" drives?

http://en.wikipedia....oot_(hard_drive)

http://palazzo.pro.b...seu/bigfoot.htm

To be able to handle 6 Gb they had 3 5.25" platters!

jaclaz

[puntoMX]

jaclaz, on 04 August 2010 - 05:45 AM, said:

Anyone old enough to remember the "bigfoot" drives?

I Loved them; Good price and fast, about 12MB/s, for that time and none ever died on me in 4 years. You would not believe it for sure, but at the time they were released I dropped SCSI for video editing and went with the bigfoots. Also customers never came back for a replacement.

Now, talking about reliable drives; it's now a HYPE to re-manufacture/rebuild/refurbish drives and push them to Africa, large part of Asia and to Latin America... Most of them fail after 6 months. We here have a sh/t load of WDs and Seagate for sale, but I refuse to sell them.

[jaclaz]

puntoMX, on 04 August 2010 - 10:39 AM, said:

You would not believe it for sure, but at the time they were released I dropped SCSI for video editing and went with the bigfoots.

You are right : I don't believe you.

To be more exact, I do believe you , but I won't believe that bigfoots were anywhere near being comparable in speed with SCSI.
Unless I am mistaken at the time we were between SCSI Ultra wide and Ultra2 and Quantum ATLAS disks (the common size was 9.1 GB) simply blew away anything else (for a rather steeep price ).
Additionally SCSI have traditionally used no (or very little) processor time, that at the time was VERY important for graphical or video work.

jaclaz

[VideoRipper]

Hehehehe, my first hard-drive was a 10MB MFM from IBM.

Can't remember how many platters it had, but I guess it would be
a lot since it was 5 1/4" wide and two units (about 3") high