Hi, Im just buying parts for a computer upgrade and I notice my new motherboard supports Serial ATA
I know this is supposed to be much faster than standard hard drives but what is the compatibility like?
What are the differences?
and can i use it along side a standard hard drive (IDE)

any suggestions are much appreciated as I dont want to spend a lot of money on something that isnt going to work

cheers

Serial ATA is great. I have three 200Gb SATA drives which I use for video editing and the speed is tremendous.

Provided your motherboard still has IDE channels, you can mix and match the two. But, to be honest, you probably won't go back to IDE.

The only drawback with SATA is that you need to have the drivers on hand (and on floppy disk) when installing Windows from scratch, and some versions of Norton (Symantec) Ghost won't see the drives.

to my knowledge at the moment SATA has no speed improvements over ATA unless its very small files because HD's dont read fast enough to transmit at the full 133mbps that ATA does, let alone the 150mbps of SATA...

I think the only time it makes an actual difference is something like those 10000rpm raptors, but I'm sure they're SCSI only?

im thinking of doing the same....got 120 gig and want another that is bang the same hard drive but serial ata...price is pretty much same so thought id go for the one that is supposed to be better....havent got the cash to do it at the mo thou

Been looking at a few techy websites and the future seems to be with ATA with improved performance and reduced power consumption, so I added it to my order, thanks for the suggestions anyone.

Just out of interest, I went for the Western Digital (Best brand in my opinion) SATA 200Gb 7200rpm with 8mb cache and it set me back £60

cant be bad!

I've been using IDE 133 drives for a while and went to a SATA 150 setup on my main work PC about 5 months back..

The speed difference is there but not a massive one...

That said... the main thing I'd watch out for with purchasing hard drives is checking for good reviews.. there are some absolutely awful models out there in the 250Gb+ range, at the moment, in terms of reliability and/or noise levels..

Check reviews carefully and be careful about making assumptions based on older model reviews being a good indicator for other models of the same brand.. it doesn't work that way...

Originally posted by Martin_s
The speed difference is there but not a massive one...

that would be because technically the drives are exactly the same speed they were before, the only situation I can see improvement in speed is when the files are equal to or less than the HD's cache... HD's are very fast at finding files and when they first start transfering...

if you do a quick HD speed test you'll see this.

on my new 250gb ATA133 16mb cache HD, its theoritical transfer limit imposed by the IDE cable is 133mbps... it has a burst speed of 106mbps... but a sustained speed of 65mbps...

so really, it never even gets close to its limit, therefore, unless SATA drives are faster than 7200rpm, how can they be faster? and to my knowledge the number of drives over 7200rpm in the average user market is REALLY slim

Just gone down from 2 SATA Seagate HDs in RAID 0, to just 2 SATA hard drives vanilla, so I can dual (erm, well, triple) boot without my brain melting out my ears working it out if it goes the way of the pear, & believe me, that made a speed difference... :(

Tempted to get silly & go for http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html for my next machine...

Originally posted by steev
Just gone down from 2 SATA Seagate HDs in RAID 0, to just 2 SATA hard drives vanilla, so I can dual (erm, well, triple) boot without my brain melting out my ears working it out if it goes the way of the pear, & believe me, that made a speed difference... :(

Tempted to get silly & go for http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html for my next machine...
Yeah... I'd avoid RAID 0 (Striping) unless you have a VERY good off-machine backup policy that includes your system files as well...

As for dream machines... look at the Gigabyte. GA-8AENXP-D board... Talk about upgrade potential! :)

Hmm, not what I had in mind... They're entirely different, I'm waiting for the dual core Opterons.

& those P4's? I want a PC, not a heater :P

Have you looked at the Tyan board?

Originally posted by steev
Hmm, not what I had in mind... They're entirely different, I'm waiting for the dual core Opterons.

& those P4's? I want a PC, not a heater :P

Have you looked at the Tyan board?
Good grief... there's no way I'd need that much power...

Something for some to drool over though I'm sure :)

As for the P4 heater issue... to be honest I've found they run a whole lot cooler than the 2800+ XP I've got so I'm fine :)