Re: SATA and IDE Hard Drives

[Konstantin Svist <fry.kun@xxxxxxxxx>]

Karl Larsen wrote:
>    Well today with hdparm I learned what I should have guessed. The 
> difference 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 just 
> a newer design of the old IDE and not much faster. I will use it but 
> not for anything but another kind of thing. Maybe F9.
This should not have come as a surprise. There is no magic in the world 
and there's no magic in the machines. If the speeds of the vanilla SATA 
were significantly higher than IDE, everyone would've switched already 
instead of drooling over solid state drives.
But the thing is, SATA is only one of the methods for letting the 
computer communicate with the hard drive. The method might be more 
efficient 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 HDs 
simultaneously on 2 channels of a single IDE controller vs. 2 sata 
channels... In other words, copying data from HD1 to HD2 should be 
faster with SATA drives as they're independent of each other (while 
master/slave IDE devices "lock" the bus and only one can talk at any 
given time). So, if you're setting up RAID, you either go with 
SATA+software RAID or IDE + hardware RAID controller (if SCSI is not in 
the picture, etc.). I could be wrong though.
There are also other considerations.. like improving the airflow inside 
the computer case - SATA cables seem to be naturally better suited for that.