Moving from IDE to SATA HD

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ubergeek14

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I have a 1TB Western Digital Black SATA HD coming in the mail soon and it will be replacing my aging 300 GB IDE hard drive, which is on the same cable as an 80 GB IDE HD. I will also be getting 2 more GBs of RAM in the mail, which will bring my total RAM capacity to 4 GBs. I am currently using Vista x86, but will remove the old HDs and install Vista x64 on the 1TB drive.

My question is will I see a speed difference between the IDE drives and the SATA drive, like for instance loading games, videos, recording game footage with FRAPS, encoding video? Will it be noticable? And also, if i keep the old IDE drives in my system just for storing music and documents, will they slow down the system? Thank you!
 
Depends on the drive's characteristics as well, but each drive being on its own dedicated cable and port, not to mention the efficiency of a serial interface of parallel probably wouldn't hurt.

SATA drives are also generally slightly faster due to the drives being more modern than IDE, as IDE is being phased out, the current drives (you probably don't have a "current" IDE drive, but one bought a few years back), so you should be able to see a slight increase in speeds.

Will it be noticeable? Depends on the drive. It's not like it's a jump from hard disks to SSD, that's for sure.
 
Download HD Tune and test your old and new drives. Also put a stop watch on the boot up and shutdown times for the old and new drives.

But yes, I think the new drive will be noticeably faster.

I would hold off installing the new RAM until you figure out the HD issues.

Don
 
Keeping the old drives won't hurt anything.
2 disks on the same PATA cable can slow down access to those disks compared to the same 2 disks on separate cables if both are being accessed at the same time, but that's really about it. It's basically a non-problem since it only comes up during simultaneous access.

The WD Black 1TB is one of the fastest 7200rpm drives on the market, so it will be quicker than the older disks. I'd certainly put your OS and apps on it since they'll load a bit faster.

Having 2+ drives can help a lot in situations where you can split the work across the drives. It's probably most noticeable if you're doing something that isn't CPU bound and involves reading and writing either a large number of files or a large amount of data. I'm not sure if video encoding qualifies... never actually done it myself. It certainly helps with compressing or decompressing large .zip & .tar files though. Copying files from one drive to another is also a lot faster than making a copy on the same drive.

The extra drives could also come in handy for watching video while doing something else. If you're doing something disk intensive involving the same drive the video is on it can cause it to drop frames.
 
I'd expect quite an increase in speed, simply due to the SATA drive being newer and better. My WD6401AALS has a minimum transfer rate that's almost the same as my Seagate 7200.10 500GB SATA's average transfer rate. Even against a decently modern SATA drive, the WD6401AALS is quite a bit faster.
 
these are the read benches i got from my 80 GB and 300 GB hard drives:

HDBench.jpg


here's a pic of a HD Tune read bench of the 1TB Black HD i got from http://www.sinlung.com/geek-o/toysngadgets/western-digital-caviar-black-wd1001fals.html :

95167_hdtuneread.jpg


would that be noticable?
 
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It'll definitely be noticeable in file transfers and the like, it'll be faster in game loading and startup but probably not "noticeably", if you know what I mean.
 
ubergeek14 said:
would that be noticable?
Click to expand...

Also look at the access times. One thing to keep in mind, with a bigger drive you can fit more in the fast beginning section of the drive. For example, let's use a 32GB partition. On the 80GB drive, that's the first 40%. On the 320GB drive, that's the first 10%. On the 1TB, it's the first ~3%. Simply having the data in a physically smaller portion of the disk means the head has to move less to access it, which reduces seek/access times.

In that range on the 80GB, you have 54-56MB/s and 4-19ms access times.
On the 320GB, it's about 70-74MB/s and 4-14ms (there's some weirdness at the beginning there).
On the 1TB, it's basically 103MB/s and 3-10ms.

I used an old 40GB SATA drive temporarily until I got my WD6401AALS because I didn't want to format my old 7200.10 yet. The 640GB is definitely noticeably faster than the 40GB, in regular usage. It just makes the whole system snappier. Obviously it's much quicker when looking through files in Explorer, where things just seem pretty much instant.
 
Also look at the access times. One thing to keep in mind, with a bigger drive you can fit more in the fast beginning section of the drive. For example, let's use a 32GB partition. On the 80GB drive, that's the first 40%. On the 320GB drive, that's the first 10%. On the 1TB, it's the first ~3%. Simply having the data in a physically smaller portion of the disk means the head has to move less to access it, which reduces seek/access times.

In that range on the 80GB, you have 54-56MB/s and 4-19ms access times.
On the 320GB, it's about 70-74MB/s and 4-14ms (there's some weirdness at the beginning there).
On the 1TB, it's basically 103MB/s and 3-10ms.

I used an old 40GB SATA drive temporarily until I got my WD6401AALS because I didn't want to format my old 7200.10 yet. The 640GB is definitely noticeably faster than the 40GB, in regular usage. It just makes the whole system snappier. Obviously it's much quicker when looking through files in Explorer, where things just seem pretty much instant.
Click to expand...

wow @_@ would you recommend i partition about 32GB out of the new HD for the OS? if i understand correctly, that part of the hard drive would be the closest to the center and have the lowest access time, making the entire system more responsive, yes?
 
Partition around 60 gigs just for the OS. 100+ if you intend to install the OS and apps on the same partition. I noticed a rather large performance increase when moving from my seagate 7200.7 pata drives to my wd black 640.
 
ubergeek14 said:
wow @_@ would you recommend i partition about 32GB out of the new HD for the OS? if i understand correctly, that part of the hard drive would be the closest to the center and have the lowest access time, making the entire system more responsive, yes?
Click to expand...

I was just using 32GB because it divided into 80GB and 320GB nicely. There's nothing magic about that number.

FYI, the fastest part is the outside edge, rather than the center near the hub. It has a larger circumference, so there's actually more space for data in one revolution of the drive.

The smaller you make the partition, the faster it will be. You're forcing everything into a small area, and the smaller that area is, the less distance your read/write head will have to physically travel.

It really depends on exactly what you want to do, but the first 10% of my WD6401AALS shows up at basically the same speed on HD Tune. The next 10% is just a little slower. Comparing the 20% point to the 40% point though, you can see the numbers starting to drop off (though it is still quite fast even at the 50% point).

Your HD Tune seems to show the 1TB dropping off around 10%, which would be 100GB. Even the first 20% (200GB) of the drive should be quite fast, but the smaller you make it, the faster it will be. Both because you're limiting it to the very fastest parts of the drive, and you're limiting how far the head has to travel back and forth to find files. If I had that drive, I'd probably use the first 100GB for short-stroking. If you don't need that much for your OS and apps, make it smaller.
 
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