Ultra ATA vs. SATA

[Zephik]

OKay... So I always thought SATA was better than Ultra ATA? Isn't the Ultra a IDE?? Someone correct me... cuz I am so confused now lol

Btw: the geek squad said that Ultra was better... o.O ???

[Zephik]

Okay, geek squad was completely wrong. My friend bought me a new HDD, but it was Ultra ATA. Ultra ATA sucks! I think what they meant was that it is better than the earlier IDE HDD's. Luckily he can take it back and get a refund. So he's going to buy a 320 seagate SATA off of newegg.

-SF

[ESX]

Ultra ATA is IDE, yea, its those 80c cables.
SATA (or SATA2) is better than UATA (UDMA). :)

[progbuddy]

If you want a really fast harddrive, try a Western Digital Raptor SATA HDD. Transfer = 3 GB/sec and are faster than the average SATA (10000 RPMs, woot!).

[ESX]

If you want a really fast harddrive, try a Western Digital Raptor SATA HDD. Transfer = 3 GB/sec and are faster than the average SATA (10000 RPMs, woot!).
2 of those on RAID 0 would be sweet :)

[fragged]

IDE Standard is old.

Back in the day, Hard drives had a couple hundred KB cache, and had max speeds between 10mb/s and 50mb/s. They used ATA/66 this was sufficient for the times. But now, hard drives are going at 60-80mb/s more has to be done, faster ATA standards came out. the number stands for the amount of mb it can transfer per second, so there were cable standards called ATA/66 ATA/100 and ATA/133 (I think this is UATA).

Along the same time there was SCSI (pronounced scuzzie) which are now used in server's, these were very messy cables (thicker IDE's) and would cater for about 6 drives, and required a terminator.

People realized that having multiple drives with one cable going to each was bad, because the standard required wait times for drives to respond, having two drives on separate IDE cables was allot better than two on the one cable. So some smart person decided to create a new cable standard called SATA.

Sata now comes in two forms, SATA and SATAII (not to be confused with SATA2, which is yet to be released) SATA specifies 1.5gb/s and SATAII 3gb/s. They allow for NCQ, along with more bandwidth. And require no Master/Slave function (FINALLY). Most drives are both SATA and SATAII compliant, changing a jumper will slow it down/speed it up, this is because some older mobo's don't support SATAII. Basically, if your motherboard supports it, use SATAII.


If you want a really fast harddrive, try a Western Digital Raptor SATA HDD. Transfer = 3 GB/sec and are faster than the average SATA (10000 RPMs, woot!).

Wrong wrong wrong. A drive's maximum speed is bottlenecked inside the drive. SATA came out to prevent it being bottlenecked at the cable in the future. Just because you buy a SATA II drive, does not mean its going to run at 3gb/s. A Raptor runs about 80mb/s, and has about a 3.4ms access time, as opposed to a standard drive which is 60mb/s 12ms.

If you want a truly fast hard drive, there are a few solid-state-storage drives, which are basically chip boards that you throw DDR sticks of ram in. They run at about 2000mb/s and 0ms access time, but are volatile, which means that if the inbuilt battery runs out, your data is gone :(

I hope this clears things up, it probbably wont, because i'm tiered. But as a rule of thumb, if your motherboard supports Sata II, get a Sata II drive, if it only supports Sata, get a Sata II drive and run it in Sata I, if it doesnt support SATA, get an IDE drive OR fork out $100 for a cheap Sata IDE card. The only exception to this rule is if you plan to switch your drive from new/old computers, then get a IDE...

-Fragged

PS I'm getting my WD Raptor 74gb in 2 days :D

[ESX]

IDE Standard is old.

Back in the day, Hard drives had a couple hundred KB cache, and had max speeds between 10mb/s and 50mb/s. They used ATA/66 this was sufficient for the times. But now, hard drives are going at 60-80mb/s more has to be done, faster ATA standards came out. the number stands for the amount of mb it can transfer per second, so there were cable standards called ATA/66 ATA/100 and ATA/133 (I think this is UATA).

Along the same time there was SCSI (pronounced scuzzie) which are now used in server's, these were very messy cables (thicker IDE's) and would cater for about 6 drives, and required a terminator.

People realized that having multiple drives with one cable going to each was bad, because the standard required wait times for drives to respond, having two drives on separate IDE cables was allot better than two on the one cable. So some smart person decided to create a new cable standard called SATA.

Sata now comes in two forms, SATA and SATAII (not to be confused with SATA2, which is yet to be released) SATA specifies 1.5gb/s and SATAII 3gb/s. They allow for NCQ, along with more bandwidth. And require no Master/Slave function (FINALLY). Most drives are both SATA and SATAII compliant, changing a jumper will slow it down/speed it up, this is because some older mobo's don't support SATAII. Basically, if your motherboard supports it, use SATAII.



Wrong wrong wrong. A drive's maximum speed is bottlenecked inside the drive. SATA came out to prevent it being bottlenecked at the cable in the future. Just because you buy a SATA II drive, does not mean its going to run at 3gb/s. A Raptor runs about 80mb/s, and has about a 3.4ms access time, as opposed to a standard drive which is 60mb/s 12ms.

If you want a truly fast hard drive, there are a few solid-state-storage drives, which are basically chip boards that you throw DDR sticks of ram in. They run at about 2000mb/s and 0ms access time, but are volatile, which means that if the inbuilt battery runs out, your data is gone :(

I hope this clears things up, it probbably wont, because i'm tiered. But as a rule of thumb, if your motherboard supports Sata II, get a Sata II drive, if it only supports Sata, get a Sata II drive and run it in Sata I, if it doesnt support SATA, get an IDE drive OR fork out $100 for a cheap Sata IDE card. The only exception to this rule is if you plan to switch your drive from new/old computers, then get a IDE...

-Fragged

PS I'm getting my WD Raptor 74gb in 2 days :D
I see that you know quite alot about stuff :)
Why are the raptors only 74gb? Do you always sacrifice storage space for speed/transfer rate?

[Zephik]

If you want a truly fast hard drive, there are a few solid-state-storage drives, which are basically chip boards that you throw DDR sticks of ram in. They run at about 2000mb/s and 0ms access time, but are volatile, which means that if the inbuilt battery runs out, your data is gone :(



What are those called? Link?

Why don't then take out the battery and hook it up to the power supply?

[Redundant]

I searched Solid State on NewEgg and it came up with this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815168001)

Specifications
Type Others
Internal Connectors 1 x Serial ATA 150
Interface PCI
Transfer Rate Up to 150MB/s
Dimensions 8.7" x 4.1"
Well, it's obviously not as good as fragged says but it's considerably faster than a HDD.

[Zephik]

?

http://www.superssd.com/products/tera-ramsan/

[Redundant]

?

http://www.superssd.com/products/tera-ramsan/

Normal people don't buy that.


Requires 2,500 watts of power.Imagine the electric bill...:eek:

[Zephik]

Normal people don't buy that.

It was just an example, like how they are made because it says "solid state".


Imagine the electric bill...:eek:

lol

True dat! I sure wouldn't want to pay up!

[fragged]

Why are the raptors only 74gb? Do you always sacrifice storage space for speed/transfer rate?

Because as a tradeoff for 10000RPM, the magnetic disks inside the hard drive are somewhat smaller (i think)....

Basically as far as SATA hard drives, all I've seen are the WD Raptor range, being 36,74,150gb each (then theres the Special Gamers Edition 150gb with a window, which is uber leet and uber expensive) as far as corperate SCSI drives go, i've seen upto about 300gb+ which is kinda crazy, and kinda expensive too..

As far as 10krpm goes, i'd stick with whatever you use as a primary partition, I used to have a Windows (50gb) partition on my 160gb hard drive, now, instead I have a 74gb drive thats dedicated to windows and games, not movie files etc that dont need super fast x-fer rates...


Well, it's obviously not as good as fragged says but it's considerably faster than a HDD.


Internal Connectors 1 x Serial ATA 150
Transfer Rate Up to 150MB/s

AFAIK, Gigabyte were doing a SATAII version aswell, probbably am wrong about the speeds, seeing as they'd bottleneck at the cable (and afaik the fastest ram they use is DDR333)

interesting links you might wanna look at are
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/05/hyperos_dram_hard_drive_on_the_block/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/

[jdbnsn]

I think he is talking about a RAM bus, but not sure. A friend of mine used one of these and said it was wicked fast allowing him to boot to windows in a few seconds, but they are expensive.