Jump to SATA from IDE. is it really worth it?

medrep · 16 Feb 2006 at 18:49

Hi all,

I currently have a WD 40gb and an IBM 80 gb IDE hard drives. Both are fairly old and noisy drives and am looking to update to quieter and faster drives. What kind of differences would I expect from my current set up below with a sata 2 drive and what would you recommend I go for?

I mainly use my system for web browsing, ms office, MP3 playing/download and gaming.

Any thoughts?

thanks again for a brilliant site

Medrep

moody · 16 Feb 2006 at 20:00

Performance wise I never saw much of a difference between upgrading from IDE to Sata drive. The only advantage I notice is the fact that the SATA cables are far easier to work with esp when trying to tidy your wires plus these no carry on in regards to setting up the jumper settings. I suppose if your planning on having 3 or more hard drives then Sata will probably be easier to work with.

You will notice a jump in performace thou if you get a Raptor.

bluesouljah · 17 Feb 2006 at 01:10

I noticed, but that's probably because I started with a Raptor and then two in Raid 0.

ToLearn · 17 Feb 2006 at 01:18

cant say i noticed a big jump in performance either

binaryknight · 17 Feb 2006 at 01:27

as far as i know sata just gave more bandwith to ship data off the drive with and the drives are still limited by the actual rate the drive can spin / read data at.
isnt the bandwith limits of the ide pci bus around 133mb/s which general drives sata or other dont reach? excluding raid

Behemoth · 17 Feb 2006 at 21:50

I went from an IDE drive solution to a SATA 2 drive and I noticed a big difference. Well at least I noticed a difference anway.

muckymick · 17 Feb 2006 at 23:49

Same here,not really noticed any earth shattering speed difference but much neater install with the thinner cable.
I am happy with my Samsung drive and tend to use nothing else when building or upgrading for people.Very quiet drive too.

basmic · 17 Feb 2006 at 23:51

I wouldn't hold high hopes for any improvement.

Currently the only benefit has for me over IDE, is the narrow cable - means better airflow.

Until either hard-drive manufacturers get their fingers out their backside, or we get faster permanent storage, then we're stuck with the pathetic limits of hard-drives.

moir · 18 Feb 2006 at 04:26

i noticed a good diffrence, but i went to a raptor for my 1st sata drive

decto · 18 Feb 2006 at 18:55

I went from a 80GB 7200 Maxtor ATA133 2MB to a 250GB 7200 Seagate SATA 16MB.

Loading/startup times are improved and there is less hesitation accessing the disk.

I put this down to better drive electronics and a larger cache rather than the change in interface.

If you have an older 5400 drive you'll notice an improvement to 7200 and 8mb cache

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Combat squirrel · 18 Feb 2006 at 23:06

iv got 4 drives, 2sata and 2IDE, windows, pagefiles, etc spread across all of them, no noticible difference.

The only difference I notice with drives is how new they are, how fast the spindle speed is and how well the manufacturer has written the drives coding, my IBM sata drive is noticibly faster than my maxtor one, yet there both specced the same