Ultra ATA vs. SATA

[LoveTheBass]

I'm a noob with a very quick question, and I know it's going to be up for debate both ways, but I can get a Hitachi 160 Gig, 8MB cache, Ultra ATA hard drive for 60 bucks. I was seriously considering this, and then I started looking into SATA and it seems like SATA is much faster. While I'm sure this is true, I'm wondering if the costs > benefits. 160 gigs for 60 bucks isn't bad at all, I just need to make sure that the Ultra ATA isn't going to be so slow that it would be just easier to get a SATA drive.

Thanks for any feedback.

[Lazn_Work]

There is no real speed difference between them. Yet.. With the exception of the fast but small WD Raptor drives.

http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-010481.htm

"Transfer Rate
ATA/133 is available from some manufacturers, but is it money well spent? Consider the sustained versus the burst transfer rate.

Sustained vs. Burst Transfer Rates
Sustained transfers refer to a continued transfer that does not occur from the drive cache. Burst rates refer to data transferred directly to/from the high speed cache. A true indicator of performance is sustained rate; however, most drives are advertised with their faster burst rate.

A typical ATA/100 hard drive bursts at about 100MB/sec from the cache, but has a sustained rate of about 26-42MB/sec, depending on the drive. If you consider a best-case scenario with the 2MB cache full of data, 100MB/sec will quickly deplete the cache and commence transferring at the lower sustained rate.

ATA/66 hard drives are typically less expensive and do not saturate the 66MB/sec bandwidth available. In fact, a hard drive with a sustained transfer rate of 26MB/sec will not even saturate available ATA/33 bandwidth.

In summary, sustained transfer rates should be considered over burst transfer rates for maximum hard drive performance.

Serial ATA
Serial ATA is the latest desktop hard drive technology. Serial ATA transfers data serially as opposed to the parallel transfers on traditional ATA drives (PATA, or parallel ATA), which addresses ongoing crosstalk and line noise concerns with PATA.

Serial ATA initially launched at 150MB/sec transfer rates, with SATA II expected to increase to 300MB/sec at launch, and SATA III is expected to increase to 600MB/sec. These are burst rates, not sustained transfer rates, but the sustained rate is higher than the typical PATA drive and has much more room to grow. "

==>Lazn

[Octave]

if you plan on future proofing....go with the SATA.
If your mobo supports it.....get SATAII with NCQ
and if you wanna go all out go with a raptor drive or something.
as far as SATA1 vrs Ultra ATA.....the difference is insignificant except for the future proofing.

[SparksNelec]

Correct me if I'm wrong but SATA I becomes more beneficial if you're using 2 or more hard drives since 2 PATA drives connected to the same cable will have to share that bandwidth. Each SATA drive gets its own bandwidth dedicated. And isn't SATA seperate from the PCI bus if the controller is integrated into the chipset, thereby eliminating the PCI bottleneck? I agree though, the performance increase is insignificant.

Yes, SATA II drives are the way to go if you have the controller for it.

[Octave]

Correct me if I'm wrong but SATA I becomes more beneficial if you're using 2 or more hard drives since 2 PATA drives connected to the same cable will have to share that bandwidth. Each SATA drive gets its own bandwidth dedicated.

Somewhat correct, yes. However, if you have two seperate IDE channels for your two HDDs...on seperate cables, there wouldnt be any issues. But if you have 2master/2slave so 4 HDDs in RAID or something on SATA.....each would have its own channel/cable. And actually....sata1 drives, if you dont run into other bottlenecks....are relatively the same as IDE drives. And the fastest drives probably wont be able to take advantage of the full 150mb/s that SATA1 provides, but ya....future proofing/slight performance gain is the way to go.

[shaihulud]

2 PATA drives connected to the same cable will have to share that bandwidth there is no fighting for bandwidth. both devices are independently timed and have full bandwidth of protocol that is in use by the device. however, there is only one interrupt, so windows cannot induce multiple read and rights concurrently (e.g. using channel one and channel two concurrently). also, since it is pata, the transfer will need to terminate before another can begin-one after the other.

SATA.....each would have its own channel/cable. And actually....sata1 drives, if you dont run into other bottlenecks even though it has its own dedicated path to the host interface, there still is contention and need for arbitration. integrated to the south core logic removes it from the contention and arbitration of the pci bus. this is an extreme benefit, but still there is always a fight for the delivery of data.

sata would be the way to go since pata is being phased out.

[LoveTheBass]

So I'm collectively hearing SATA would be the best way to go. Would there be a problem with using a SATA and an Ultra ATA HDD at the same time, with two different connections to the motherboard perhaps? I need to upgrade my motherboard (and everything else really) and I'm wondering if they have that kind of functionality.

[Octave]

Yes, i can do it on my p5gd1 asus mobo. Althought, im not able to run both IDE raid AND SATA raid at the same time according to my manual....but whatever, not like i would.

[defakto]

Some of the Nvidia based boards will now run raid across the sata and pata ports.

[Bullitt]

SATA vs PATA in my mind boils down to this:

Sata offers no significant speed boosts to my system. however, the cable runs are much cleaner (my sata ports are closer to my 3.5 bays and the cables are easier to route)

I'm using sata for a marginal performance gain but asthetically MUCH more pleasing to my eyes. And the price difference is negligible.

[needmorecarnitine]

if you plan on future proofing....go with the SATA.
If your mobo supports it.....get SATAII with NCQ
and if you wanna go all out go with a raptor drive or something.
as far as SATA1 vrs Ultra ATA.....the difference is insignificant except for the future proofing.

lolz

buying the SATA drive won't "future proof" him from anything

[Octave]

ya it will, such as my board right now, the p5gd1....i have one channel that i have both of my DVD-ROM drives hooked up to, and i have 4 SATA ports or 2 IDE ports.....i can either use SATA or IDE.....i CANNOT use both. Once i have an SATA hdd plugged in, my other ide ports are useless....so pretty much, once i have one sata HDD....your going all SATA....not to mention SATA2 is 300mb/s....and there will be sata3.....4.....5.....6..........ect...
and i believe they are all backwards compatible......THEREFORE......when the newer boards are all running pci express and sata....with just one ide channel.....arent YOU gonna feel stupid when you have to have your one HDD and one DVD+-RW on the same damn cable cause you wouldnt future proof by spending an extra 3 fricken dollars on an SATA hdd instead of an IDE

[Lazn_Work]

ya it will, such as my board right now, the p5gd1....i have one channel that i have both of my DVD-ROM drives hooked up to, and i have 4 SATA ports or 2 IDE ports.....i can either use SATA or IDE.....i CANNOT use both. Once i have an SATA hdd plugged in, my other ide ports are useless....so pretty much, once i have one sata HDD....your going all SATA....not to mention SATA2 is 300mb/s....and there will be sata3.....4.....5.....6..........ect...
and i believe they are all backwards compatible......THEREFORE......when the newer boards are all running pci express and sata....with just one ide channel.....arent YOU gonna feel stupid when you have to have your one HDD and one DVD+-RW on the same damn cable cause you wouldnt future proof by spending an extra 3 fricken dollars on an SATA hdd instead of an IDE

Strange, my IC7-G (Max-II) has on the southbridge, two IDE channels, Two SATA channels and I can use them all (6 drives) at once, plus I also have two more SATA on the silicon Image controller. (for at total of 8 drives)

I used to be only able to use either or, like your MB.. but a later BIOS update allowed all the channels on the MB to work at once. Check to see if your MB has a BIOS update that will do this for you..

==>Lazn

[defakto]

Why does everyone think sata automatically give you the full bandwidth of the interface?

Yes, Sata is 150 mb/s, yes sata2 will be 300 MB/s per channel, but no harddrive comes close to that, even 15k scsi drives only hit 80-90 MB/s With bursts approaching 150.

[Lazn_Work]

Why does everyone think sata automatically give you the full bandwidth of the interface?

Yes, Sata is 150 mb/s, yes sata2 will be 300 MB/s per channel, but no harddrive comes close to that, even 15k scsi drives only hit 80-90 MB/s With bursts approaching 150.

This is what I tried to say in my first post, but everyone ignored it.

==>Lazn

[Octave]

I also am well aware that the drive will probably never max out the connection speed of even sata1....HOWEVER...using NCQ of the newer drives on SATA is a nice performance gain. Not to mention, i believe if you run raid 0,1, or 0+1, your going to have a much faster performance than regular IDE, last time i checked......
but as far as straigt out sata1 vrs ide.....its roughly the same damn speed......unless you count NCQ in there

[defakto]

NCQ only helps under heavy load, it's not a general performance increase. So it's nice if you're a heavy multitaskter, but other than that...eh...not so much.

[Lazn_Work]

NCQ only helps under heavy load, it's not a general performance increase. So it's nice if you're a heavy multitaskter, but other than that...eh...not so much.

Indeed, in single user situations NCQ actually SLOWS DOWN your hard drive.. It really only helps multiuser (server) environments.

==>Lazn

[Octave]

so i guess since i use my computer as a heavy workstation, transfering huge files (and i mean huge) like cad/solidworks shit all over the place NCQ is a plus :)

[b18turbo]

At CompUSA their is a sale on Maxtor 250gig 16mb buffer 7200 rpm for $100. The only thing I don't like is that it is UltraATA instead of SATA.
http://www.compusa.com/products/products.asp?N=200112+400057+502461&Ne=502457

The SATA drive is $80.00 more. Do you think it is worth it for SATA or should I go ahead and get the drive on sale.

[Octave]

go ahead and get that drive, it dosent sound like you'll need to be taking advantage of sata any time soon.....all you want is storage....so get it.

[b18turbo]

This will be my only drive, and I do some gaming so I want a fast drive. I like the Maxtor for the 16mb buffer otherwise I would look around.