SATA and disc accessing

[westrock2000]

I don't know the exact term for it, but I was wondering if SATA has addressed the way multiple devices access on the bus compared to IDE.

By that I mean in IDE when say the CD-ROM is copying to the HDD, the CD-ROM accesses, then the HDD, then the CD, then the HDD. But in SCSI they are able to both access at the same time which makes it smoother and doesn't bog down the bus. Its the only real "noticable" benefit I have seen on SCSI compared to IDE systems I have had.

So I was wondering if a completely SATA system (HDD & Optical) would be "better" at this then the older PATA / IDE system.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Well, first, if you have all sata drives and one IDE optical drive nothing will be slowed. You don't need a sata optical drive to get good performance.

The answer is It Depends. If your sata controller is on the northbridge or connected by a fast bus like PCI Express, yes, you can get full bandwidth to all your disks at the same time. If it's on PCI, though, you can be limited by that bus.

SCSI is limited to one device talking at a time, believe it or not. It's generally got a faster bus, though, which can mean increased performance despite that limitation.