I have a couple of questions, 1st I have a maxtor 80 gig hard drive it is on a ata 100 cable, I have a sata slot on my motherboard, whould there be a major speed incress with the 150 sata hd. 2 I was messing aroud with my computer and I enabled the sata controller in my bios and in the device manger under ide it doubled everything, 2 contollers 2 master 2 slave I wanted to know if this is ok or normal amd will it change if I get a sata HD istalled thank you soory it was long
I will take a stab at this. From what I read I gathered the following. You have an Ata 100 or 133 HD. You noticed you have a Sata slot which runs at 150. So you are wondering if enabling the SATA would increase the speed of your current drive. The answer is no. It will not speed up hat drive. However, if you install a SATA drive into that slot then you will have a faster drive. Settings to the SATA slots have no effect on your IDE slots. there is a difference in 133 to 150 but most do not notice. It does tend to be more stable. -Del
unless you're doing some really hardcore stuff, a sata drive isn't really worth it. while it is the wave of the future, ide still meets the needs of most perfectly.
Yes the only real advantage to SATA without need for speed is the ability to mirror. Although some MB will do that with IDE it works better with SATA. Mirror means you have two Sata drives of the same size. The computer will make them appear as 1 drive to the operating system. So what ever you do will be put on both drives at the same time. If one fails you just unplug the bad one and run off the other until you can get a replacement. There are other ways of setting up RAID but they have a high risk of data loss. -Del
True. No, this is not necessarily true. Don't get confused about "speed of a drive" versus "speed of an interface." SATA and IDE are different interfaces, and do in fact have different maximum interface speeds (as discussed above). However, this really doesn't have much to do with the speed of the drive itself, since most drives don't use the full capacity of even the "slower" IDE interface. Look at things like avg seek times, rotational speeds, platter density, etc. when you thinks about a drive's speed. And, then go an look for some real world performance benchmarks. In general SATA drives do run faster, not necessarily because of SATA... but just because SATA is a newer interface, and newer-made drives (with SATA or IDE) in general are faster than older-made drives (which only carry an IDE interface). See, I could easily find a SATA drive (from a couple years ago) that runs slower than a brand new IDE drive... if you left me pick the brands/models. At this point, I agree that the speed increase is not worth jumping from IDE to SATA... In general, the drives themselves are still too slow and don't make good use of either of these interfaces from the get-go! ;-)
