Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Meatwad on November 24, 2012, 08:03:00 PM
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Is there really that much difference between the two types of drives? I have a 160gb IDE, been looking towards a SATA drive as this one is failing SMART status and tests now.
Will be a fresh install of XP on it, but will it really be that much faster loading/booting/program access/etc?
Will be sata 1 at the 1.5 gb rates. Dont plan on upgrading the MB yet
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SATA is vastly faster.
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SATA is standard with 6 Gb/s connections now on mobo's. Unless you have a drive that can write that fast (I'm guessing you don't) it won't matter much.
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MB is about 5 years old or so, only capable of SATA I. Havent really decided on how big of drive I want. 500gb would be plenty good since eventually this PC will be replaced, likely with a combo/barebone package in the future.
Amazon had a 2TB drive for $70, Seagate barracuda drive. Waiting to see if monday has anything on sale before I pull the trigger on one
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For a single drive, IDE is theoretically about as fast as SATA... Except that the drive manufacturers quit putting new tech into the IDE drives a few years ago. It isn't necessarily the interface that makes SATA drives faster now, but the drives themselves are better too. The good drive tech just isn't used on the IDE drives anymore.
I got "identical" IDE and SATA drives a few years ago, and although neither drive came close to fully saturating either the IDE or SATA bandwidth, the SATA drive was about 20% faster than the IDE drive for both seeks and transfer rate. The IDE drive wasn't crippled since it was just as fast as an identical one I'd purchased a few years earlier, but the SATA one had a new controller chip, better cache, better internals overall.
So, go SATA even if not buying a huge new drive. Also the price should be about the same, maybe even lower per GB for SATA.
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Don't buy anything that wont serve you well as a media/backup drive. When you build a new one you "should" go with a SSD or two. Leave the HDD as an additional to store pics/movies/songs/documents on.
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Get a 1TB Western Digital Black if your mobo supports it. Very fast drives and in my experience they are as reliable as any other consumer drives out there.
Or if you want to go cheaper get a western digital caviar blue... Slightly slower and shorter warranty but my 1TB WDC blue ran for 2 years nearly continuously as a windows home server backup drive without any problems.
Do NOT get a western digital caviar GREEN. Those should be called western digital caviar POOP. Slow, horrible wake-up time after they haven't been used for a few minutes, the goofy power saving logic seems to reduce drive life, and you really won't notice the power savings unless you are running a hundred or so 24/7.
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olky way to go is with SSD! get a good SSD 120G boot drive and then buy an SATA HD for storage. the SATA HDD will boot faster than any IDE Drive! But you gotta buy a good SATA HDD! Now the SSD with boot like lightning comparded to either!
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wd black has 5 year warranty As far as I know hardrives are backwards compatible if you buy one that is faster then your MB supports, but might want to read the specs before you buy and make sure.
goodluck
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Mine is backwards compatible. The SSD drives look really nice but still $$$
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Sata Drives have a much higher bus speed than IDE.
I tried buying an IDE drive about 5 years ago and everything I could find (which wasn't very much) cost significantly more than an equivalent SATA drive.
Bus speed has got to be the most under looked, underappreciated, and most important specs when it comes to anything confuser related.
Dell, HP and all other nationally advertised computer brands use this to make their customers think they're getting a good computer when really they're getting a shiny new piece of crap.
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Sata Drives have a much higher bus speed than IDE.
I tried buying an IDE drive about 5 years ago and everything I could find (which wasn't very much) cost significantly more than an equivalent SATA drive.
Bus speed has got to be the most under looked, underappreciated, and most important specs when it comes to anything confuser related.
Dell, HP and all other nationally advertised computer brands use this to make their customers think they're getting a good computer when really they're getting a shiny new piece of crap.
Bus speeds are underlooked because in most cases the devices can't come close to filling up the bus in the first place. Conventional harddrives gain little to none by moving from SATA3 to SATA6 for example. Same story with graphics cards, the shiny new PCI-E 2.0 spec doesn't matter anywhere outside advertisements when the card can push 50% of the PCI-E 1.0 bandwith at it's best.
You need to have hardware that is actually limited by the bus to see any benefits - such as is the case with SSD drives.