Would Serial ATA Hard Disk Make any difference ?

I am getting a new Hard Disk & I was wondering what difference a Serial ATA Hard disk make over ATA 133 HDD ?

I have DELL P4 2.6 GHz, 512 MB DDR ( 400 MHz ), 80 GB Maxtor ATA 133 HDD.

I want to replace 80 GB ATA 133 (7200 RPM) with a new 160 GB HDD and was wondering whether I should get regular ATA 133 OR Serial ATA HDD ?

Can you please tell me the Pros & Cons?

Thanks
Mike

 

Little to none on a smaller HDD. The faster interface speed doesn't overcome the bottleneck of the mechanical rotation. Data can only rotate so fast under a read head, so fairly often the only effect is a burst to the read/write buffer.

However, the larger the capacity of the hard drive, the more dense the data is packed onto the disk (in general). So if you compare two single-platter drives with the same rotational speed, the one with the higher capacity will have higher data density and will therefore be able to pass more data under the read head in the same amount of time. So a higher density disk tends to have higher throughput. It's the same as the difference between a DVD and a CD. They're both 5 inches across and can rotate at about the same speed, but because the data is so much more dense on the DVD you have much higher throughput. That's why installing off of a DVD is so much faster.

Once we start seeing non-mechanical hard drives as well as dual-layer and multi-layer hard drives the interface speed might become the bottleneck, but that's not likely to happen for another 4-5 years. By then, faster interfaces will likely have been developed.

 

Forgot the second question.

PATA (or ATA) is well-understood technology. It's advantages are that it is supported by all operating systems back to Windows 95 and before. The disadvantages are that the power connectors and data cables aren't the easiest things to work with. The data cable takes up a lot of space on the surface of the motherboard, which increases it's cost. Parallel cables also block airflow, whearase the SATA cables do not. PATA power connectors are not very easy to work with, but all PSU's have connectors for them.

SATA has a higher interface speed, but that's not a huge issue. The major cons are that you may not have power connectors on your PSU for the new SATA power connection (converter dongles are available, and some SATA hard drives have the old Molex power connector in addition to the SATA one) and operating systems like Windows XP need special drivers to install onto them because WinXP assumes a PATA world and has no generic SATA drivers. The SATA standard allows devices to be connected and disconnected like SCSI hotswapping, but I don't know if any drives or controllers support it right now. SATA is designed to compete with USB, FireWire, and SCSI as well, bt it is not currently used for that. SATA also requires that you have a new enough motherboard, of course. Legacy hardware can't use them. SATA is a litle bit more expensive right now, too.

SATA also supports Native Command Queueing (NCQ). NCQ allows the hard drive controller to read data in the order that they are layed out in the disk. If a disk has three requests, and the first one is at 2 o'clock, the second at 9 o'clock, and the third at 5 o'clock, a non-NCQ hard drive will read them 1st, 2nd, 3rd, meaning the HDD has to rotate all the way around after reading the second request before it can get to the third. An NCQ-enabled HDD will reorder the requests to 1, 3, 2 in order to prevent the requirement of that extra rotation, and therefore save time. The requests are still sent to the system in the proper order, of course. In order to use NCQ, you must have an NCQ-enabled SATA controller and an NCQ-enabled SATA disk.

If it were me, I'd probably go SATA. You won't see a huge difference, however.

 

That was a very thorough & detailed explanation.

I guess it also saved me few bucks too because I don't think my system will support it although it is fairly new but one by DELL & I am sure they would have provided the SATA if it supported it.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking time.

Kindest Regards,
Mike

 

I think you are better off going with SerialATA if your system supports it, and not for the performance, which is minimal if any, but for "future-proofing" the drive.

 

If your mobo supports SATA, that is the kind of HD I'd buy - not because it is any faster as "all else being equal" the performance diff wouldn't be more than a couple of percent either way. What does matter is that each of your drives could have its own channel. That will maximize potential data tranfer between any pair of drives. I'm assuming your mobo still has at least two PATA connectors (some budget models have only one now) and two SATA connectors for a total of four channels.

 

The rest of the gang provided more than adequate info but I wanted to add and clarify a few things.

For you to use a SATA (Serial ATA) HardDrive, you need the SATA connector on the mobo that is true but if your mobo lacks one, you could always purchase and put in a SATA controller PCI card. SATA Drives also use a different power connection but some drives do come with the older, legacy 4-pin connector on them as well as most PSU manufactures in the last 3 years would have the SATA power connectors anyhow.

The only SATA drives that leave the PATA drives behind in performance are the Raptor series from WesternDigital (especially used in a RAID 0 or 5 configurations). If you are going to use a standard SATA drive it won't be noticeably faster than a 7200rpm PATA drive with 8MB buffer (cache).

So if your PSU is lacking the SATA power connectors and mobo doesn't have build in SATA connectors, imo, it won't be worth the money to get the required setup....but of course, your call.

As far as Pros and Cons go, this is what I came up with for the moment:

Pros of SATA
1. Due to much smaller data cable, better for proper air flow inside the case.
2. No jumpers are used so easier to install and configure.
3. Yield a bit better performance when used in a RAID configuration.
4. Doesn't use up the IDE ports, thus letting you connect 4 other drives (or install 2 DVD/CD-RW Drives on seperate cables allowing better performance from each drive with less read/write errors since they wouldn't share the same data cable with other drives (CD/HD).

Cons of SATA
1. Older PC could lack the power and data connectors, forcing the user to purchase additional components or upgrades to existing ones.
2. SATA drives tend to cost slightly more than PATA (IDE) drives.

~TL

 

Great tips & help. I really appreciate it.

Thank You all.

Mike

 

If you really want to make a difference try raid 0. This is 2 drives working as 1 and it's much faster because 50% of data is on 1 disk and 50% on the other. It accesses data much faster because it gets bits of one file from both disks.

Sata does support NCQ but this feature is only available on selected hard disks, sata contollers and motherboard chipsets.