Serial ATA Hard Drive Question

[craiger]

Hi. I have a Western Digital 80 gig 7200 Ultra ATA hard drive my Dell 4600. It can be uprgaded to a Serial ATA hard drive. Are Serial ATA hard drives that much faster than Ultra ATA hard drives? Thanks, Craig.

[yuki chan]

In some cases serial ATA is faster than standard ata 100

Not a huge performance jump (only 10-20%) from ata 100

I am guessing that since you have a WD it is ata 100 and you might see 10 % boost

I have a serial ata Seagate and 2 ata 133 maxtor drive and only see a 3% difference favorable to the sata side

Yet I can see a jump of 15 % from my fathers ata 100 Hitachi drive at 7200rpm

So its up to you (also a 8mb buffer will help on any interface of ATA)

[minchin]

In general, not much. I assumed that you know that to convert a PATA to SATA, you need a converter, like Serillel2 from Abit. Basically, you are still using a PATA drive. In fact, you might actually be suffering a lost since there will be a PATA -> SATA command conversion.

The only true SATA drive on the market at the moment seems to be Seagate and the WD Raptor. All other SATA drives contains the same kind of converter as the Serillel2 (Serillel2 uses SI chip, most HD uses Marvel Chip).

I think that when all drives are converted to true SATA solution and thus have SATA optimized firmware to fully utilize the interface, I think you will find that both will offer similar performance....

Of course, if you do a RAID 0 with SATA drives (a lot of mother board offer SATA RAID solution)... that would be different story...

Min