Is sata worth it?

Hi, I am going to be building a new computer in about a month, and I was wondering if it would be worth it to get SATA harddrives. I currently have 2 80GB Maxtor ATA 133 harddrives in my computer. They arent raided currently, but I was thinking if i set them in a raid 0 array, that they would be faster than a single SATA. I know that some SATA are 150 MB/s transfer rate, which isnt a huge increase in speed, but i heard they came out with 3.0 Gb/s, which is around 270MB/s transfer rate. I know my info, just don't know how big of a deal is harddrive transfers. Thanks for any comments.

 

I have heard the same .. performance is not that much better.. but you can usually do sata raid.. (I know with some cards you can raid ide too)..
So I'd second Major Attitude on this.

 

Heres my 2 penneth... when installing XP OS on SATA RAID Stripe, it takes about 23 minutes as opposed to an EIDE setup of about 35 mins.. and any transfer to the RAID from the Eide is exceedingly faster than Eide to Eide.. I rest my case ..........

 

Their is little difference in speed between SATA I 7200rpm and a IDE 7200rpm, their is a considerable difference SATA I 10,000 and IDE 7200. Also SATA II Mobo are availble, but SATA II HD's have not been released yet, they will be SATA II 14,400 which will have and avergae speed of 150MB/S, burst may be more, but average is what counts. Raid 0 is more a fad and braging rights that any actual performance increase, this is a curret article on Raid 0. That said, if you have $$ get the WD Raptor or wait until summer when SATA II HD's come out.

 

Here's the article http://www.atomicfire.net/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=8

 

Hi again tomiboy. having looked around and having used the both Eide and Sata this about sums it up without any complicated figures.............
Final Words:

The current SATA standard provides significant benefits over ATA in terms of convenience, power consumption and, most importantly, performance. The main thing ATA has going for it right now is history, as it has been the standard for so long that it will not likely disappear any time soon. The future of SATA will be even more interesting as speed increases will help hard drive development keep pace with other key system components.

 

I'd like to thank to everyone who has responded to the thread. But I guess to give you more info on what i plan on doing is that i want to build a computer in the summer. I was gonna spend around 800-1000 bucks on upgrading my current comp, which means new mobo, cpu, ram, psu, and video card. I guess im gonna have to look into the SATA II HDDs when they come out to see if they are worth it. I was hoping harddrive speeds wouldn't be that big of a deal for the next 2-3 years, so i could use my current EIDE HDDs. I guess it's more of a prediction thing if i want to play it safe, spend less on other parts and get sata harddrives, or take the risk and spend a grand on parts and keep the HDDs i have now. I'm obviously trying to keep my costs below a grand since im probably gonna be upgrading my computer every 2 years. Thanks again for all the input though.

 

for Movie ripping and organization (1GB plus files) they work great... Even on my polished turd. I can decrypt and compress in about 20 minutes but the real elation happens when I create an Nero image file in 2.5 minutes. My poor little XP2200 1.7 processor couldn't do that without the 2 striped WD 10k's... (or could it. never ripped before getting them). Problem is system crashes every 8-10 projects if I don't reboot. Also moving from Western Digitals to raid 0 Maxtors is noticably faster (not quite 2x like I was hoping but fast enough to be practical)... but I suppose that would be true of any striped setup.....

 

I'd guess the new SATA II's are going to be quite expensive when they first hit the market and for some time after that. So it might take a pretty big bite out of your budget, especially if you were thinking of buying two SATA II's. And it'll be new technology which likely means there'll be some problems that will only be revealed once large numbers of people start using them with a variety of hardware and software configurations. That's just the nature and complexity of new technology interacting with the huge (I was going to say "nearly infinite"...but what's that mean??? *L*) number of different motherboard/BIOS/OS/utility (and other software) configurations in unforseen ways. I'd rather cheer from the sidelines for those who don't balk at paying to be guinea pigs (or turd polishers! *L*) for the latest hardware. Once the smoke clears and the blood dries and the manure sweepers have cleaned up (and the prices drop) then I'll sign on! *L*

Hard drives have been one of the main speed bottlenecks on computers for some time so I'm all for advances in hard drive speed as long as it doesn't cost me too much. But for a "gentleman of leisure" (aka retired) like myself, time is not money, as it is for a business. I can wait a few extra seconds for a game to load up. And stuff that really takes a lot of time, like a full hard drive backup, I start running before going to bed or out to dinner or whatever, so that's not really a concern either. So, unless you have a really compelling need (as opposed to just lust for new technology, which I imagine most of us here share) for increased hard drive access speed, I'd suggest you put your money into the other new parts for your system and wait until the SATA II technology comes down in price and has enough of a track record to inspire confidence that most of the kinks have been discovered and ironed out.

But hey if your budget will allow you to get a couple of SATA II's and you want to go for it, do let us know how it works out.

Good luck!

 

decrypting, compressing, encoding... none of them are bottlenecked by drive speed. Most of the work is done by the processor.

If you had a particularly slow ATA drive, it might be... but its more loading a lot of data fast (say loading a very large image file) then methodically processing a file then writing it that is affected by drive speed.