• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

SATA Route -- New Desktop System

N

njc

Gawd
Joined
Apr 30, 2002
Messages
581
For your standard recreation/gaming machine, is a SATA drive really necessary? I haven't built a new gaming system in about a year, and that was when SATA, while released, wasn't getting widespread use... has that time come for me to make the jump? why or why not?

thank you in advance
 
Speaking my own personal opinion, which may or may not apply to you.

I don't think SATA is worth it unless you want performance (WD Raptor) drives or you are out of space on your PATA cables. The other consideration is that SATA is a dedicated channel, whereas PATA allows two drives on one channel.

All things considered, it's a price/performance decision. SATA costs more in the end, but it may be worth it if you are going for all out performance.

I will be switching to SATA for my next drive because I've used all 6 of my PATA connectors up, and I hate my old Promise Ultra133TX2 (Data corruption problems).
 
I'll second the above and add that the convenience factor of SATA is another reason to go that route if you are on the fence. I'm lazy, and the difference between dealing with SATA cables compared to old IDE cables was just about reason enough to go the SATA route for me. Granted, the HD I'm using is one of those "performance" drives that may actually be gaining some benefit, but I also ended up going with an SATA burner as well just to avoid having the old PATA cables in my machine.

That said, while the majority of folks probably don't run into an additional problems from using SATA drives, the chance is greater than sticking with PATA. I added in the HD no problem, but getting the burner fully functional was a bit of a pain. My specific motherboard has issues with the specific drive I picked up which resulted in me not even being able to get far enough into the boot to get to the bios when I initially hooked it up (using the NF3 integrated SATA controller, which is also what I had my HD connected to). Long story short, I had to add in a floppy drive so I could boot to dos and flash back to an older version of the bios for my motherboard (the bundled flash tool only let you move forward in bios revisions). The real problem was figuring out that this is what I needed to do to get the drive working. Once I had a good version of the bios installed, everything went smoothly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top