sata worth it? Anyone know if getting sata hard drives (and a suitable motherboard) is worth the money? It's for desktop use.
Sounds good. The motherboard im getting has onboard sata raid 0 as well as a standard ata controller whcih means I can go either way really. I have more ide disks than ill ever need so I either use a 40gig ata disk or buy a sata one (all my divx, mp3 etc are stored on a media server so I don't need any more that 20gb really). Just not sure how bothered I am about anything other than disk speed for a desktop (games and divx ripping) machine. Was thinking if I get a sata drive about getting this one.... http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Western_Digital2.html (top one on list). Thanks for the help, I thought i'd out teckied the whole board!
The whole max transfer issue is a bit of a myth in the consumer sector.... ata 66/100/133 has been a great way to sell upgrades to people but it doesnt get over the big issue: Even the best scsi drives can only read/write 60 megs a second, and considering IDE drives are the bottom of the drive performance scale, these will transfer even less... Therefore the only way to max out the theoretical bandwidth of ATA is to Raid array your drives and use some level of striping. Since SATA right now for the most of the market (excluding the 10k rpm raptor drives) is just a typical ide drive with a different connector (performance is more or less the same as IDE right now) ..... then the same is true of them aswell. Bottom line to see any kind of performance increase in SATA worth pimping money, you need to have them in a striped Raid 0/5 array. Having said that, SATA drives will eventually have minimum specs better than those of current top of the line IDE drives - so in a year or two it will definately be a no brainer choosing them.
