You need a SATA controller to attache SATA hard drive. Lots of motherboards come with these on board in addition to the EIDE and cards are available. The technologies don't conflict, but they are definitely not interchangeable. SATA transferring data faster, but is only 7 pin connector. how come can be faster than 80 conductor IDE? (i also understand that USB is faster than parellel port, but still wanna know the technical issue inside.)
http://www.maxtor.com/en/technologies/serial_ata/faq.htm
Be aware with SATA, most of the bios needs upgrade even if they have SATA controller on that. High-end motherboards use the ICH5 Southbridge (part of Intel 875P chipset). ICH5 has 2 SATA ports integrated. Silicon Image is another chip manufacturer used for on-board SATA support.
Right now the speed difference between SATA-150 and ATA-133 or ATA-100 is negligible. Even 7200rpm drives can't usually sustain more than 50 megabytes/sec of transfer anyway, let alone 100, 133, or 150MB/sec.
Obviously the extra bandwidth comes into play when you've got multiple devices on a single IDE channel but if performance was really that critical you'd have every device on its own connector.
The SATA connectors are much more convenient, the cost increase now is negligable (and will flip as time goes on), and the ceiling is much, much higher. SATA has none of PATA's limitations.
But should you replace PATA drives today with SATA drives? No. Should you consider using SATA if you get a new PC or motherboard with SATA support, and you have to buy drives anyway?
You can also buy adapters between SATA and EIDE. I'm not sure all configurations are supported, but you should be able to go between EIDE connectors on the motherboard and a SATA drive.
Regarding performance of SATA drives: http://research.microsoft.com/~Gray/papers/MSR_TR_2003_70_%20SATAPerformance.pdf
A Quick Look at SATA Disk Performance
We have been investigating the use of low-cost, commodity components for multi-terabyte SQL Server databases. Dubbed Storage Bricks, these servers are white box PCs containing the largest ATA drives, value-priced AMD or Intel processors, and inexpensive ECC memory. One issue has been the wiring mess, air flow problems, length restrictions, and connector failures created by seven or more Parallel ATA (PATA) ribbon cables and drives. Large capacity Serial ATA (SATA) drives have recently become widely available for the PC environment at a reasonable price (1k$/TB). In addition to being faster, the SATA connectors seem more reliable, have a more reasonable length restriction (1m) and allow better airflow. We tested two drive brands along with two RAID controllers to evaluate SATA drive performance and reliability. Each disk delivers about 50 MBps sequential and about 75 read IOps and 130 write IOps on random IO. The cards saturate at 200MBps on sequential but scale linearly to 8 disks for random IO. A surprise is that software RAID1 generally performs best and is easiest to manage."
"You can also buy adapters between SATA and EIDE. But it is not sure all configurations are supported, but you should be able to go between EIDE connectors on the motherboard and a SATA drive".I thought they had ones that went both ways, but I could be wrong. Why would you want it? So that drive manufacturers have an incentive to start making SATA drives right away without risk of reducing their market from people who still only have PATA connectors.
I've accidentally ruined so many PATA cables (by pulling the socket thing off the ribbon) that I was really looking forward to SATA... But alas, the SATA connector is still a flimsy little plastic thing. It doesn't even lock in place.
I'm not sure what the whole point of ATA is these days; why not just use FireWire? (probably because the controller needed between the bus and the disk is still fairly expensive... but it would be so much nicer to run your whole storage system on one or more hot-plug FireWire buses)
Out of curiosity, if more people used SCSI, would the prices come down to IDE levels? Or do the drive electronics mandate a minimum pricing?
The cost difference between SCSI and IDE drives is not just the interface. Largely it is the market targeted by the drive makers. They design their SCSI drives for business use, and therefore make them more reliable and faster. IDE drives are for consumer use so they are made to be as inexpensive as possible.
It is possible to make SATA drives on par with SCSI drives, for a price. I imagine it would be possible to make SCSI drives almost as cheap as IDE drives, but it is not worth it since there is not a mass market for SCSI drives, especially now with SATA.
I have heard that the Western Digital Raptors (the 10K SATA drives) actual share drive hardware with their SCSI cousins, which is why they're available in the common SCSI sizes (36GB and 72GB) and not in the more typical PATA sizes.
The biggest question most of we can't answer is the difference between SATA and PATA or as the techno-weenies call it "regular hard drives". Because this forum pretty much saves me about a 15 to 25 minute education process for customers, I would like to thank you guys for having this thread up here for me to print and hand to people and let the PEBKACs slowly do the math themselves. On a slightly related note tho...I haven't seen much thought being put out on one potential for SATA...I could be wrong but listen for a minute...the S in SATA is Serial..we have had serial ports for awhile and know how they work..USB (still a Serial Bus) made things easier..one of the nice things about USB being on a "serial bus" its biggest point of sale is "hot swapable" And from what I have been reading about all of the PCI-X stuff..being that everything there is going to be a serial bus..the most simple things like sound cards/modems/nics/ EVEN Video cards are gonna be hot swappable.
Granted that its not the primary drive that you have booted from and are now using an operating system on...would your SATA drive currently be hot swapable...or is that something that is currently limited by todays Parrallel interface bus south bridges. Or am i the first to ask that? (on a related note i know i have lost any and all ability to spell).
Some people said that PATA is faster than SATA, in some case.
but the technical note, certified that SATA is much more better than PATA. How is the PATA works when transferring data with 80 conductor IDE cable?
The price diffential between PATA Seagate 120Gb and SATA. Seagate 120GB(2mb, I haven't checked out 8mbs yet) is nearly 15%, 4400 bucks to 5600 bucks. Also whats the advantages and Disadvantages of Maxtor vs. Seagate. I also hear a lot of scare stories of how the PATA 2mb 120gb seagate is crashing a lot. Anyone heard anything?
