SATA vs eide?

[saqdeez]

I have an 80gig EDIE hd, and now everybody has SATA it seems. Is there a big difference betweent the two? im going to assume SATA is faster, has bigger bandwidth pipe or something...Will it affect games also?

[roninblade]

load times? yes, every day apps? not that i can see

[xonik]

As an interface, Serial ATA increases the bandwidth ceiling yet again, though this does nothing to affect single-drive performance. As the industry has shifted towards Serial ATA, the best drives may now be found on that interface, but one can attribute any performance advantage to internal factors like caching schemes, firmware optimizations, increased areal density, etc.

[Dew]

Performance difference, in single drive? Negligable. Cable management ease difference, huge.

Personally, I'm going SATA for all my NEW drives, still keeping all my old PATA drives in a second system.

[Dark Ember]

In addition to those mentioned...

There are also a lot of features on newer SATA drives that are not on PATA drives. NCQ, Hot Swappability to name a couple. Check out www.sata-io.org and you can see a lot of the nifty stuff about SATA.