NAS - Stay PATA, or change out for SATA?

[Xaeos]

Hey guys. In the next couple of days I'm going to come into a new NAS box courtesy of one of our fellow [H] users. Its going to come without drives of course, but with a 5 in 3 hotswap PATA cage, and a 4 port PATA Highpoint RAID controller.

The question here is, would it be worth it for me to purchase a new drive cage and RAID card to move to SATA 2 for performance gain. Is it worth it to build a PATA array right now, and invest in PATA drives, or should I make the switch to SATA? Thanks!

[skeeder]

the difference between ATA and SATA is small, if you got the money/drives go for ATA, but if your just heading into it, then why not get SATA since its newer and slightly nicer to work with?

[protias]

Hey guys. In the next couple of days I'm going to come into a new NAS box courtesy of one of our fellow [H] users. Its going to come without drives of course, but with a 5 in 3 hotswap PATA cage, and a 4 port PATA Highpoint RAID controller.

The question here is, would it be worth it for me to purchase a new drive cage and RAID card to move to SATA 2 for performance gain. Is it worth it to build a PATA array right now, and invest in PATA drives, or should I make the switch to SATA? Thanks!
You won't be able to get full speed of SATA II. I was running some benchmarks on my Raid 5, 4x320 Seagate AS drives, and was only able to get 173 MBps. I'm going to say (not entirely sure, but pretty sure) all Raid controllers support SATA II and are backwards compatible with SATA I (this is true I know for sure). Just for the sake of cabling, go with SATA, you will not regret it ;) IDE drives are a pain to deal with.

Oh, and congrats on a NAS :)

[TeedOff]

The NAS box is pre-cabled for PATA so I wouldn't think ease of cabling would be much concern.

The motherboard in that box only has PCI interface and no on-board SATA ports so you would be limited by that anyway.

So, to go SATA in this instance would require a new SATA adaptor card and a new drive cage...certainly the simplest/cheapest route is to drop some PATA drives into the removeable trays and off you go.

Full disclosure...I sold him the NAS box.

[protias]

The NAS box is pre-cabled for PATA so I wouldn't think ease of cabling would be much concern.

The motherboard in that box only has PCI interface and no on-board SATA ports so you would be limited by that anyway.

So, to go SATA in this instance would require a new SATA adaptor card and a new drive cage...certainly the simplest/cheapest route is to drop some PATA drives into the removeable trays and off you go.

Full disclosure...I sold him the NAS box.
Ok, I did not know this information before hand, so.... :p

[Xaeos]

Yep, he's the guy :)

I guess it really most financially viable to just throw in some PATA drives. I've never had a decent NAS before, so I wasn't sure if there was a big benefit to "future proofing" it with SATA.

Thanks guys. I'll just find myself some PATA drives :D

[TeedOff]

I wish you had mentioned that you needed drives...I have a few 300GB PATAs I need to get rid of...

[general]

Define performance. Is there a reason why you need more performance and how much more. What does that mean? Do you need higher sustained throughput? Dig deeper to make sure you even need to know the answer.