• A Great friend to the HardForum with a great kid that he is trying to get a scholorship to continue his schooling. Please give hime a vote! Only 24 hours left! Thanks.
    If you have an VOTE FOR KEENAN!

What is the difference between these 2 harddrive designs?

P

Parker

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 18, 2006
Messages
418
IDE Ultra ATA100
SATA 3.0Gb/s


In the market for a WD 500GB HD but it's narrowed down to those types and I don't know the difference.
 
Either your motherboard supports both, or only IDE. A lot of new motherboards have only one IDE channel and that is commonly take up by a DVD burner or other optical drive. SATA is faster overall and is also hot-swappable. The price difference shouldn't be too significant.
 
The first is the older IDE standard and is a slower version at that.
The second is SATA and is the newer faster SATA spec.

If you dont have SATA ports, get a PCI SATA controller.
I wouldnt buy an IDE drive now.
 
Nenu said:
The first is the older IDE standard and is a slower version at that.
The second is SATA and is the newer faster SATA spec.
Click to expand...

While the SATA spec does provide for a higher transfer rate, it does not affect performance much. If you car cannot drive faster than 50mph, it does not matter whether the speed limit if 65 or 95.
Nenu said:
I wouldnt buy an IDE drive now.
Click to expand...
I agree.
 
drizzt81 said:
While the SATA spec does provide for a higher transfer rate, it does not affect performance much. If you car cannot drive faster than 50mph, it does not matter whether the speed limit if 65 or 95.
Click to expand...

I agree with what you are saying as long as it applies only to a low number of drives :)
The standard applies to SATA controllers as well and in a RAID array, a 3GB/s controller will be able to sustain higher data transfers from a larger RAID array.

Thats just for clarity, I'm not knocking your point.
 
Nenu said:
a 3GB/s controller will be able to sustain higher data transfers from a larger RAID array.
Click to expand...

The 3 gigabit/sec limit is the amount of data that could come across a single port. Unless you're using port multipliers, that means that *each drive* gets its own 3 gb/s of bandwidth. So the size of the array is irrelevant - if you have 8 ports on your controller, you could (theoretically) transfer 2400 MB/s.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top