IDE vs SATA

PowerDemon · 28 Nov 2007 at 22:14

I have 2 SATAII drives at the moment but when you do benchmarks and actual transferring from drive to drive i really dont see any difference in speeds compared to IDE drives.
I did have Maxtor 40gb and 80gb ATA133 drives before and tbh speedtests were exactly the same with them as they are with my SATA drives.

Is there really any benefit in having SATA or SATAII from having IDE drives?

helmutcheese · 28 Nov 2007 at 22:18

I find SATA snappier and have used since it was launched but the fact remains no single HDD runs more than 100MB Sustained so ATA100 is fast enough, so obv is ATA133, apart from Burst Rates.

What happens when you Raid drives and 100MB is bottleneck, thats where SATA150 and more so SATA300 come into play, plus added functions of NCQ/Hotplugging(SATA2) and neat cables.

Borden · 28 Nov 2007 at 22:18

The main benefit for me is the physical size of the cables.

I think no current hard drives have a sustained read that can max out the bandwidth an IDE cable provides.

semi-pro waster · 28 Nov 2007 at 22:41

mark1 said:
I think no current hard drives have a sustained read that can max out the bandwidth an IDE cable provides.

Completely correct, the new Seagate 7200.10 250gb drive is about as close as you can get presently with an average speed of around 90mb/s apparantly but in real use you'll probably still see less than that.

Also like helmutcheese says, unless you Raid drives you won't be maxing out the bandwidth available generally but as mentioned the cables are neater, the price premium is negligible and most new motherboards only come with one IDE port so it makes sense to buy SATA.

helmutcheese · 28 Nov 2007 at 22:50

I think that speed was the actual headline if on THG as was MAX not AVG

semi-pro waster · 28 Nov 2007 at 23:02

helmutcheese said:
I think that speed was the actual headline if on THG as was MAX not AVG

Could have been, it is getting late and I didn't check back before I posted.