Whats the big Deal with SATA?

BECAUSE IT OWNS, didn't yo mama tell you that

very constructive post
SATA harddrives have NCQ algorithm to seek data.. or something along those lines..

and it is the future of HD's .. and ya sonoma supports SATA.. thats y it is talked about very often i guess

Dude, i'm freaking board

Besides the higher transfer rate, many designers are thrilled because it is
a Serial Interface rather than a large parallel one like ATA - See here........

You could always use all that spare time to take spelling lessons.

Bored

Haha..zing

From a desktop perspective, those little SATA cables take up alot less room, improve air flow, and are a hell of a lot easier to snake around places than the giant PATA cables.

the performance is much higher, larger drives typically perform better because more data is in a smaller area making the head work less. Looking at my specs with Raid IDE 200gb drives much larger than my 76gb SATA raptors....my raptors in raid 0 get 120mb a second on benchmarks....where as my IDE drives in Raid 0 but much larger only get 60-70mb a sec.

And so you can compare with single drive systems the SATA drive by its self with out a raid gets about 60-70mb a second and the IDE drive 35-40.

Also, Harddrvies are the slowest part of a computer....their pretty much the only part that is continually accessed but yet slow and mechanical....that's why it is important to speed it up as much as possible to lessen the already huge bottle neck.

He did spell it correctly, just the wrong word. I was wondering why he was a piece of lumber.

Now, would a SATA 5400rpm drive be faster than a PATA 7200rpm drive?

..i didn't know they made 5400rpm SATA drives, so i couldn't tell you.

Let's see...

• Their cables are much smaller and also easier to connect without conflicts.
• Eventually, once software fully supports them, they will be hot-pluggable (other than the system drive, of course)
• Some please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they draw power and data from the same cable...right?

Serial ATA has it's benefits (smaller cables, command queuing, scales better, etc.) and it's more futureproof then Parallel ATA (allows higher transfer rates), but saying something like "the performance is much higher" is misleading. Serial ATA is a interface, that's all. It *allows* a hard disk to reach higher transfer rates, SATA does not enable higher tranfer rates in of itself.

How does aerial density have anything to with the physical interface a hard disk uses?

You're ignoring the fact that those Raptors have a 10000 RPM spindle speed. Your IDE drives run at 7200 RPM at best. Spindle speed has a far greater impact on transfer rates than aerial density. Hardly a apples to apples comparison. Not to mention RAID has nothing to do with Serial ATA...

At this point in time, you are correct: it's the mechanical nature of a hard disk which causes it to be a bottleneck, not it's interface. (At least, not at this point in time.)

So, what point were you trying to make anyway? Your post was all over the place...

Not necessarily. But all other things being equal, the answer would be "No".

i wanna know the same?

It could be my bitter cynicism, but I think it's because most people are mindless consumers who jump at the smallest excuse to spend their money. (Hey, "150" is bigger than "133", it must be better! I must have it! Now!)

Seriously though, for notebook / motherboard designers, it's a boon because there's a lot less electrical traces to route which means less space on the PCB is taken up. PCBs become slightly easier to design and verify. Result: cheaper PCBs / notebooks.

Correct on both counts.

They're out there. Check out www.anandtech.com or www.storagereview.com among others.

While Serial ATA does have nice features associated with it, the fact that it enables higher transfer rates is somewhat moot, since the fastest SATA drives (at 50 - 70 MB/s) still don't come close to maxing out a PATA pipe, let alone a SATA one.

Hope that helps.

As for SATA interface in its self not being any faster, It is a more optimized interface and optimization is what makes all the difference. Look at CPUs, Video cards, they all have similar stats but the most optimized ones do better in the area their optimized for.

So, go find a 7200 RPM SATA drive, then get the IDE version of that drive from the same company, and look at the benchmark differences.

A larger drive is faster because the disc can hold more data, and because the disc can hold more data that means the data takes up a smaller area on the disk then it would of on a smaller drive. I was trying to show how even though the SATA drives were at a disadvantage with smaller discs, they still can do very well against a drive with that advantage over them, making it worth sacrificing a little space for performance.

yes my IDE drives were 7200 rpm, show me a IDE 10k rpm drive, i was comparing the best of IDE to the best of SATA, not just the SATA interface.

and for who ever asked if SATA drew power from the data cable, in desktops it doesn't, it has a new SATA power connection which allows safe hot swapping.


forgive me for my previous scattered post, I think while I type. The point I was trying to make is it is important to lessen the biggest bottle neck in the system with as much speed as you can currently get.

SATA drives do much better at sustaining a higher speed. Right now I am using one SATA 150 drive and one IDE 133 drive at work (also do you know only maxtor makes IDE 133 and it does not really improve performance) my SATA drive in raptortest.exe hit 100mb 3 out of 5 tests in a row. Where as the IDE 80gb maxtor 133 drive hit 25mb 3 out of 5 times.