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Should I wait?

H

HardyOne

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 17, 2004
Messages
179
I have 2 80gig Seagate SATA 150 hard drives that I have had for about a year. I use the second one as a Ghost image backup. Since it is about time to upgrade the drives, I would like to get two new 200gig drives. I have heard of SATA II, but haven't really kept up on what the difference is. What about SATA 200 or SATA 300, are these anywhere close to being released and should I wait for something new in SATA technology? I have an Abit IC7-G with a P4 - 3.0
 
Drive performance increases at a roughly linear rate. Given that your drives are a year old, there's no real reason to upgrade to newer ATA units at this stage unless you're literally out of space. It will be several years before the drives are capable of saturating SATA 150, and the follow-on versions of SATA will require either direct lines to the chipset or PCI-Express lest they saturate the PCI bus.
 
Remember that ATA100 is still faster than the drives can transfer data off the platters. I wouldn't hold my breath for any new innovations in transfer technology, especially since SATA cures PATA's two main ills-huge cable and channel errors. Even at that, should SATA2 be much better than SATA, you can always get it for your main drive from which your OS boots. If you are out of space, get one or a pair of these and you'll have more than enough storage for the time being as well as the benefits of SATA. Transfer speed is just not a huge issue with drives intended for the storing of large amounts of data only accessed infrequently or at user request only such as video, music, software, etc. I guess the moral here is that SATA is not broken with regard to features or data transfer rates, so why wait for its "fix" to come along?
 
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