Fedora Users — Re: SATA and IDE Hard Drives

Karl Larsen wrote:

Well today with hdparm I learned what I should have guessed. Thedifference in data flow is not enough to even think about. I paid$70.00 for my SATA and it is just not what I had hoped for. It is justa newer design of the old IDE and not much faster. I will use it butnot for anything but another kind of thing. Maybe F9.

This should not have come as a surprise. There is no magic in the worldand there's no magic in the machines. If the speeds of the vanilla SATAwere significantly higher than IDE, everyone would've switched alreadyinstead of drooling over solid state drives.But the thing is, SATA is only one of the methods for letting thecomputer communicate with the hard drive. The method might be moreefficient than IDE, but the HD itself is still as slow as it was before.I *suspect* you might see a big difference between using 2 HDssimultaneously on 2 channels of a single IDE controller vs. 2 satachannels... In other words, copying data from HD1 to HD2 should befaster with SATA drives as they're independent of each other (whilemaster/slave IDE devices "lock" the bus and only one can talk at anygiven time). So, if you're setting up RAID, you either go withSATA+software RAID or IDE + hardware RAID controller (if SCSI is not inthe picture, etc.). I could be wrong though.There are also other considerations.. like improving the airflow insidethe computer case - SATA cables seem to be naturally better suited for that.