IDE or SATA

Im ordering a new Hard Drive on Wednesday, and I need to know the main differentces, pros, cons, etc between Serial ATA and IDE Hard Drives....Im not looking for SCSI, just a Very Nice Hard Drive, lots of space, fast....quality...you know, and I need to know which would be better. SATA or IDE. Discuss....

 

SATA hands down.

 

Hands down....does it just have faster Transfer Rating? What brands would you reccomend...IM looking for something over 200gig

 

SATA is faster and easier to setup. Personally for hard drives go for Western Digital they are some good hard drives.. I tried maxtor and one my my maxtor drives the motor died while all my western digital hard drives still work. My maxtor drive was 3 years old when it died. I got a 6 year old Western Digital still kicking.. Another advantage to SATA is that if u get 2 hard drives you can set up RAID and durastically incrase load times in games.

 

Thats what im going for. Gaming....so Two Western Digital...setup in a RAID configuration....sadly....I know very little about Raid, and have no idea how to set it up, or why I can benefit from it.

 

Have to agree - SATA is def so much easier and ive been using western digital for years and years and never had a problem.

I use on of these at the moment

 

i havent setup RAID myself but ur loading time will drop greatly and normal boot. Basically RAIDing harddrives is like SLI's video cards. instead of having to write all the data to one drive it can write it to 2 drives in 1/2 the time. I might be wrong on thsi but this is what i read from websites. I think u want RAID 0 (data stripping) if u want to RAID. Google RAIDing.. that is how i learned more about it

 

These are some pretty good articles on RAID and how to set it up

Link

Link

 

Awesome Thank you guys so much. I just read an article about a new WD Caviar they came out with. A 400 gig model. It looks pretty impressive...I saw all the scored for the tests they ran, for Gaming it scored the highest, but apparently it is pretty loud, lol.

 

Hmmm Raid 0 looks very nice...Im confused though....I dont see how it can be faster when instead of reading and writing to one drive, it reads and writes to two...to me it would seem like this would be slower....

Now I have a question

Would it be possible to go RAID 0 for now, since I dont have alot of important stuff yet, then some several months down the road, I decide to go for RAID 1 for Backup....could this be done without formating my drives? Or would I have to get a 3rd drive to store the data, while I format the other two, set them up in RAID 1, then transfer the data from the third to the RAID setup? DOes that make sence?

 

What about later down the road when gamers will notice a difference...im sure there will come a time, not even 1 year from now, perhaps?

 

Go with IDE.

 

To the guy talking about RAID 0, there really is no increase in load times for games. I set mine up and I can tell no difference. Tom's hardware (or maybe anandtech) had an article showing that you get better performance on hard drive benchmarks, but virtually no difference in load times for games. I wish I could find it.

In any case, If I were you, I'd go for SATA only because it's the new standard. Even though the drives only have very small performance increase, it's just the next step. Eventually, motherboards will come with SATA and only SATA. The real performance increase is in cache. From what I've seen, the 16Mb cache drives have similar performance to a WD Raptor drive, and they are much cheaper.

Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200Gb SATA 16Mb cache drive for $93:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822140168

 

Tigerdirect has the 300 gig version of that drive for $89.99 after Rebates

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1121653&CatId=0