What HD is best/fastest? P-ATA or S-ATA

[Frank N. O.]

I have a Seagate Barracuda 80gb P-ATA (I think) hd at the moment and while the 80gb is quickly filled and this has recently been the first hd I've ever had that's gotten bad sectors (and I have a old 300mb IDE hd for my Amiga 1200 that's over 10 years old) so now I'm thinking of upgrading since I believe my Asus P5P800 mb can have a S-ATA hd.

However then I looked at sites listing Seagate and Western Digital hd's and Seagate's are quieter and have faster data-transfer rates than the WD and P-ATA seems to be faster than S-ATA models, how can that be, I heard that S-ATA was faster and indeed they are more expensive?

Frank

[Chaul]

Well.. that's a good subject for a debate. And don't forget SATA-II or SATA300 which gives you even more (theoretical) bandwidth. The keyword being theoretical maximum.

IMHO PATA, as in ATA-100/133, is enough for current hard drives. Don't expect SATA (150) to give you much more performance if at all. I should find some reviews to back this opinion though.. They still develop both PATA and SATA hard drives and now even DVD-ROM drives with SATA connectors are starting to show up on the market.

But on a technical point of view, SATA drives use thin 7-wire data cables and are easy to connect in a small case as compared to 40/80-wire parallel cables. I suppose the thin cables are also good for air flow inside the case.

You also have to notice that SATA drives use different power cables too, which your current ATX PSU may or may not have. In that case you would need to get the adapter for it (sold separately). Personally, I have 2 SATA hard drives with these power adapters.

The first SATA drives that entered the market didn't have all the features that were advertized at first. Even the connectors were sort of in a transition phase and you could find for example both power connectors in the drives. One of the techs that was not included was NCQ, Native Command Queing. But I don't know enough about that to include a description here so I'll link to Wikipedia again. :) It has something to with optimizing the read-write cycles inside the hard drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA

[chris]

Lucio (aka BlueConcorde) on the SSTSim forums warned against Samsung HDD's after terrible unreliability.

I have Western Digital HDD at the moment. I'm thinking of replacing it down the track.. My Intel mainboard D925XECV2 was pretty much designed with SATA HDD's in mind. It has few other ways to connect IDE devices.

As long as I don't need to get 2 HDD's just to run SATA.

[Chaul]

Hmm, I was just planning on getting one Samsung PATA drive for some "project" because it should be quiet... Those SATA drives I have are both Seagate (80+120 GB). They are quiet and are working just fine.

I can't explain why PATA drives might seem faster. Maybe they have an 8 MB buffer instead of the 2MB, or the SATA drives in question are still some "transition models". In theory there should be no difference.. shrugs. Anyways, IMHO, the strongest argument for SATA over PATA is the simpler cabling, not performance at the moment.

[chris]

My WD drive is not SATA and it has 8mb cache. Some are getting 16mb cache now.

I agree completely about the cabling. The old cables are just ridiculous, so wide and awkward.

[[MC]Heiliger]

I own a 80GB Maxtor (Maxtor 6Y080L0) and it's running okay. But I'm up to change or upgrade the hdd in a few, too, 'cause of the decreasing free space. What I read about this drive is that it owns UATA-133 ( :confused: ), about the cache...it has 2MB, but what's it about that?
Another thing I'm wondering, I remind times when companies were up to increase the rpm, but it seems this way isn't that important or the best to increase the drive's performance anymore???
So what I found were P-ATA and S-ATA thingers with space till 400GB and cache which ranges of 2MB to 16MB.
And then there are mainboards out which supporting the RAID feature, if I understood it right it will run two hdd's as one in the case that datas and files would be saved 50-50 on the two discs to improve the reading and writing speed.

Maybe anybody knows what's the best solution to go ahead? And were it possible to get an objective view of that? 'cause I don't care about the brand, just show me a solid drive, which could support this RAID thingy as well, if this feature was needed.

&(

[FIATLOVE]

SATA interface. 7200 rpm or 10000rpm, and the cache size (8MB is common nowadays).

You get faster disc read/write if you let a great amount of the system-partition % as free space.

If you want even faster discs, you have to build RAID-0 system (multiple identical discs working simultaniously as one disc)

Good luck

[Chaul]

Heiliger']I own a 80GB Maxtor (Maxtor 6Y080L0) and it's running okay. But I'm up to change or upgrade the hdd in a few, too, 'cause of the decreasing free space. What I read about this drive is that it owns UATA-133 ( :confused: ), about the cache...it has 2MB, but what's it about that?
Another thing I'm wondering, I remind times when companies were up to increase the rpm, but it seems this way isn't that important or the best to increase the drive's performance anymore???
&(
I suppose "UATA" means Ultra ATA (or Ultra-DMA), which is just another version/mode/feature of parallel ATA..

With higher rpm comes better transfer rates and access times but most likely also greater noise. They can't keep increasing the rpm because of vibrations and other issues.

RAID has different possible setups (with 2 or more HDD) which increase speed, reliability or both. I don't think you need any special support for it in the HDDs themselves as long as the drives are identical. After the setup and formatting the drives will show up as one big hard drive with better transfer rates (interface and mode allowing of course). I have never set up one such system myself though..

[way124]

By the way, you can check out a lot about HDDs at StorageReview.com (http://storagereview.com). They have the LeaderBoard (http://www.storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=LeaderBoard), Performance Database (http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html) and Reliability Survey (http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/survey_login) (requires login).

[Frank N. O.]

Thank you very much for the link, it was good :wave:

I've got my eye on a WD Caviar SE16, 250 GB, 7200rpm, 16 MB, SATA II I just noticed came in the shop.
7200rpm
8.9ms
16mb cache
748 Mbit/sec
Serial ATA II interface, 300 MB/s.

My PSU btw is a nice danish-made Chill 510W high-performance ultra-silent (like a whisper! So I quiet I can barely hear it, wild!) and it does have SATA cables.

I also plan on using a lot more space to the C-drive, even if I have the pagefile.sys on the last partion since my brother said the last partion is the fastest although I'm not sure where he has his info but my 5gb just wasn't enough so I had to move it anyway (it's at 1.5gb since I have 2x512mb RAM although I'm thinking of doubling it again for FS use).

Frank