IDE/ATA vs SATA ?

[deadman_uk]

Obviously Sata Hard drives are better than ATA but what are the differences?

I have a 160GB Western Digital ATA (wdc wd1600jb-00eva0) and was just wondering what effect does this have on my systems performance in windows, converting movie files and gaming.

What benefits would I get if i got a SATA hard drive?

 

[b1k3r4ck]

Funny you should post this. I was about to post a similar question. In my XP box I am running a Western Digital 250GB SATA drive currently. It doesn't have NCQ at all as it is a newer drive (I installed in May 04). I am not that impressed with the performance compared to the PATA drive I had installed previously. I haven't run any benchmarks but it doesn't feel any faster and sometimes I think it might even be slower.

Now the time has come to install a second hard drive that I am going to use exclusively for video capture/editing. My question is if I get a newer SATA drive with NCQ will I see any performance boost or should I just save the cash and grab a regular PATA drive? I'm looking at the normal 7200 RPM drives with the 8MB of cache for both types.

deadman_uk: To answer your question about getting a SATA drive, NCQ is supposed to benefit the SATA drives that are out now. Mine doesn't have it and as you can tell from my comments above I don't really know if my dirve was worth the extra cash I paid for it.

 

[E4g1e]

Funny you should post this. I was about to post a similar question. In my XP box I am running a Western Digital 250GB SATA drive currently. It doesn't have NCQ at all as it is a newer drive (I installed in May 04). I am not that impressed with the performance compared to the PATA drive I had installed previously. I haven't run any benchmarks but it doesn't feel any faster and sometimes I think it might even be slower.

Actually, that 250GB WD SATA hard drive is not really new. It is a bridged PATA design. In fact, there is no current WD hard drive which supports NCQ at all; the only current SATA drives which support NCQ are the Seagates and the Maxtor MaxLine III/DiamondMax 10..

 

[deadman_uk]

What is NCQ?

Is IDE, ATA and PATA all the same thing?

If Sata doesnt befit you in anyway, why is it out? why does it cost more money?

Also, what does the cache do in hard drives? im guessing the larger MB cache, the better it is, but what does this mean?

 

[b1k3r4ck]

oops.. that was a typo .. should have read as it ISN'T a newer drive.

deadman_uk: yes IDE, ATA and PATA are all the same thing.

 

[deadman_uk]

can anyone give me information on my other questions?

 

[Thor]

ide is the interface, ata and pata are reffering to the same thing but are not, ata is a compression alogorythim use to distinguish it from PIO mode (programed I/O) that was use on the fist ide drives and is still in use on cd-roms (though some will do ata33)(and possibily the fastest of the dvd burners can utilize a full ata100)

pio started at 4mb/s 8, 12,and 24
then they figured out they they could compress the data and get 33 add in 40 ground pins(to the orriginal connector of 40 pins(80 total)i beleave this was called EATA at the time (e= enhanced... then again that may be something my friend made up too.. )) and get 66. (99/)100 and 133

as for why we refer to it as pata is only to seperate it from sata, it should really be called ide and sata, but we all know the difference.

nameing it sata was a pure marketing gimmick, weather it still uses the ata compression (i assume it dose) the change of interface should have had it named something else, while ide =Integrated Drive Electronics perhaps SEI (serial enhanced interface) would have been a better name "SEI 150" vs "sata 150"

but whats done is done

yes it is a faster interface, but do to the unshield cabels if it is running acrossed any other power cabels other than the one supplying the device(be it the harddrive or a cd-rom) it will cause data errors and cause a "refetch" makeing it take twice as long (that is if it gets it right on the seconed try... if it keeps messeing up, it could take a very long time)

cache is a blessing and a horrer in disguise, while the more you have the better, but it is only good for up to its limit if you lod a large game and the drive has info for word sitting in its cache, well it dose you no good once so ever, how ever what it dose help with is mutiple small files , if your loding a game level for q3 (most are under 8meg for the bsp's) it can keep the bsp in the cache and load the texture right into memory and only refer to the bsp as it needs towhen you reload the level... but as this never happens this way (unless you play the same level twice in a row ) its pretty much pointless... the only real use is for stuff like photo shop where you may be referring to images but you colse them out (thus clearing it from the ram ) and then reopen it again...the HD dosent have to look for it again it just send it down the buss

ncq = native command queing

bassicly the difference between an ide drive being masked as a sata drive, and a sata drive that was built as a sata drive, while i dont know much about it i would have to guess that a drive that dosent have NCQ will be a littel slower at getting the data down the buss basicly leading to higher access rates, once it finds the data it should still be capable of 150mb/s burst but it would have to be a damn big file for you to see the difference ( like a dvd image on the harddrive (8+gb) (or i have it backwords and it would have to be alot of littel files... all over the disk, like that of a videogame where its loading textures all over the place and thus clogging the buss, this is where haveing a good cache would come in handy i beleave)

now.. as for why sata is faster than Pata i havent the foggyest... it make no sence to me at all... you cut the number of pins 10 fold and somehow it gets faster..(there are 8 pins in a sata cable and 80 in a pata cable) if thats the case they would have been smat to use existing pata cables and run 10 sata links throught em ... effective rate of 1.5gb burst...it would have to be only 1 drive per cable so its self terminateing.. as is current sata cables... granted the pata isnt pretty, but i would rather that type of speed over pretty any day

thore

 

[ashmedai]

Obviously Sata Hard drives are better than ATA but what are the differences?

No they're not...

An SATA hard drive or an IDE hard drive will work almost identically in your computer. I use SATA cuz I usually have 8 or 10 hard drives in my system at a given time and SATA cables are easier to deal with in large numbers. SATA has a higher theoretical maximum bandwidth than IDE - but no hard drives go anywhere near either ceiling.

SATA always uses one controller per drive, which will help during some tasks - but if you put your IDE drives on seperate controllers, or arrange them in such a way that you don't load one controller at the same time too much, again there's no meaningful difference.

TCQ/NCQ are implementations of command queueing (thus the CQ part) which is useful in a high user, high-I/O server environment but meaningless on a desktop computer with one user sitting in front of it.

8MB cache is a good thing, 16MB cache is available on some drives now and will help performance a bit during certain types of tasks but not astronomically so, therefore don't go paying too much extra for it.

It costs more money because it's much much newer, although less new and therefore less of a price premium than it was a while ago.

Did I leave anything out?

 

[ashmedai]

Damnit I have to start hitting preview instead of just submit...

 

[ashmedai]

as for why we refer to it as pata is only to seperate it from sata, it should really be called ide and sata, but we all know the difference.

nameing it sata was a pure marketing gimmick, weather it still uses the ata compression (i assume it dose) the change of interface should have had it named something else, while ide =Integrated Drive Electronics perhaps SEI (serial enhanced interface) would have been a better name "SEI 150" vs "sata 150"

I try to avoid the term "PATA" as it wasn't used much before SATA came out and IDE tends to confuse people less. However the term "Serial ATA" is accurate enough as the main change was using serial instead of parallel signaling (other than revamping the controller logic to support things like hot-swap etc that make it an enterprise candidate).

now.. as for why sata is faster than Pata i havent the foggyest... it make no sence to me at all... you cut the number of pins 10 fold and somehow it gets faster..

Serial signalling can be easily driven faster than parallel signalling, and there are other fringe benefits that also help let it have a higher theoretical maximum bandwidth. However neither SATA nor PATA is actually any faster because we're comparing theoretical maximums - the actual devices work much slower, and are equal regardless of the signalling method used. If you made an IDE Raptor it'd be just as fast. Bridge chips or the lack thereof are also meaningless as far as the performance goes (unless they totally screw up the implementation, but that's a factor of bad design, not the technology itself).

 

[UICompE02]

ide is the interface, ata and pata are reffering to the same thing but are not, ata is a compression alogorythim use to distinguish it from PIO mode (programed I/O) that was use on the fist ide drives and is still in use on cd-roms (though some will do ata33)(and possibily the fastest of the dvd burners can utilize a full ata100)

Hmm, ATA does not have compression built into the specification. The way faster transfers are achieved in DMA mode compared to PIO mode is faster clock rates and different commands that allow more efficient burstinf of the data (Less CPU time is needed to move more data).

 

[Hate_Bot]

I like SATA because it helps clear away case clutter. Instead of a big floppy cable, it's just a nice small gray one.