IDE or SATA?

Z

Z(+)DIAC

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I'm almost positive this has been answered before, but I am somewhat new to the pc building realm. I would like to know what would be suggested in my particular case. I don't plan on having more than one hard drive (120GB) or so, and if it comes to the need for another I do have an external one I use regularly for my lappy. I guess I don't know the full fledge distinction between the two. What would you suggest?

If it helps anyone I just purhcased a Neo2 Plat. board, again I am not sure how this would affect my choice.

Also I plan on going Samsung seeing as I have had bad experience with Maxtor and WD.
 
samsung drives are REALLY good for the money, i have 2 of them in my laptop. and 1 of them in my sisters shuttle.

i ahve 2 seagates in raid 0 in my case they seem to be working perfect, ive always had good expirances with maxtor but i know alot of ppl have always had problems, its either hit or miss with maxtor,
 
So I am a still a bit stumped. Go with the IDE or SATA version of the HDD?
 
I say go sata. I feel it works better and the $ difference these days is small.
I also second the samsung drive. I have 2 sata drives a samsung and a seagate. The samsung has worked flawlessly for over 6 months and has the added bonus of being nice and quiet. The seagate I bought after not buying seagate for years (always seemed to fail on me). It is 1 month old and working ok, but I must say this is the quietest drive I have ever owned (its the 200GB sata) and is a good performer.
 
I think what everyone wants to say is if you're biying now, get SATA. If you own IDE from a previous buy, there's nothing wrong with it and it's still fast. :)
 
reinforcing what others have said:

If you are building new, go with SATA.

However there is nothing wrong with IDE. If I were buying new HDDs today, I'd be looking at both, because I have several machines, most use IDE, while my newest uses SATA. SATA is simply the direction drives are heading. In a few years it will probably be harder to find IDE drives and SATA will be the new standard, until the next improvment comes along.
 
I say if you are getting a new drive then go with the sata, there is not a real difference speed/performance, but it is a much cleaner install....
 
Paralysis said:
I get at least a 20% faster transfer rate with SATA than I do with E-IDE.
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nope, but the cables are smaller, so SATA is better.
 
Paralysis said:
I get at least a 20% faster transfer rate with SATA than I do with E-IDE.
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sounds like your sata drives are just better then your ide's. i can tell you right now my 7k250 sata is faster then my wd ide, but it has nothing to do with interfaces

edit: If you are gonna go sata, i would suggest that you buy some better qaulity sata cables, i got some UV reactive ones from adpmods that are EM shielded, and they are only 10 inches so they dont do a lap arround my case.

My HD Tach scores improved a little bit when i changed the cables.

edit2: If you have the money i would get a smaller/faster drive as your system drive and then a 120 for data. My Hitachi system drive is so much faster then my other 3 data drives. Samsung seems to be a good choise, I've been ghearing good things, also dont forget about seagate!
 
The diff is negligable. SATA cables are not shielded so that is a detriment for them. However the cables are smaller and they look cooler. I usually put SATA drives into machines I build but if you are looking to save a few bucks IDE will not negatively impact your performance. The speed is restricted by the internal hardware and not the interface, and few drives ever get to the max limit of IDE bus speeds anyway.
 
how exactly are ide cable shielded? unless they use a form of cancelation i dont' see any extra shielding on them. Best thing about sata is the smaller cable, and hot swapable if you want
 
k1pp3r said:
how exactly are ide cable shielded? unless they use a form of cancelation i dont' see any extra shielding on them. Best thing about sata is the smaller cable, and hot swapable if you want
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http://www.ata-atapi.com/sata.htm

The unshielded SATA cable connector is mostly like the source of many of these problems. Making things worse is the failure of the SATA specification to implement an equivalent to the ATA Soft Reset. On a PATA interface Soft Reset rarely fails to get ATA/ATAPI devices back to a known state so that a command can be retried. On a SATA interface the equivalent to this reset does not seem to reset anything and at some times it is basically ignored by the SATA controller and device.

And finally... Don't buy SATA because it claims to be faster than PATA. The marketing claims that it can transfer data at up to 150MB/second (making it faster than the fastest PATA Ultra DMA mode, mode 6 or 133MB/second) will not be seen with the SATA products that are shipping today (late 2003). Today's SATA products are actually 10% to 20% slower than PATA. This is because today's SATA products are really PATA products with an extra SATA-to-PATA 'bridge chip' in the device. These bridge chips add significant overhead to the SATA protocols. In time there will real 'native' SATA devices that do not need these bridge chips - Then we can see what the true performance of SATA. But remember SATA is a 'serial interface' and serial interfaces rarely live up to their marketing claims.
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ok, well from what i got out of that ata cables nor sata cables are shielded, however ata has a soft reset to correct any corruption and what not,
 
What I did; lurk the hotdeals forum, and buy whatever the first hard drive deal you see. Worked good for me.
 
k1pp3r said:
ok, well from what i got out of that ata cables nor sata cables are shielded, however ata has a soft reset to correct any corruption and what not,
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AFAIK IDE cables are also not shielded, however the newer variety only use every other wire, and so have an inherent "form" of shielding built in, and are less susceptible to data corruption. Correct me if I am wrong.
 
dariob said:
AFAIK IDE cables are also not shielded, however the newer variety only use every other wire, and so have an inherent "form" of shielding built in, and are less susceptible to data corruption. Correct me if I am wrong.
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about the shielding i think you are right, they may use a form of cancelation, however the cables are not the problem its the interface. I would still go with sata though, unless you pick up that 120GB WD i saw a microcenter for 29.99
 
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