SATA versus IDE

Published on February 25, 2005 By Keila In WinCustomize Talk

This is a purchase I have been pondering and am have great difficulty justifying.
I have 2 Seagate hard drives right now. 1st., 80GB for my C drive that only has 16.7 being used. 2nd., 160GB for my D drive only 10GB being used.
Now why would I want to spend probably 170.00 to get 2 new SATA drives instead? More power, faster speed of course. But is this true? How much faster are the SATA drives then the IDE? Is it really worth the money?
I would love some input on this from those of you that have seen the difference first hand.

Comments

WOM

on Feb 25, 2005

WOM would say no.

If they quit working, then maybe.

For home use(not business), what would be the need for extra speed?

I'd say, if it ain't broke why spend the money, but thats me.

Phoon

on Feb 25, 2005

I agree with WOM. My current system at work has a 150GB SATA drive and a 80GB IDE. Seriously, I don't notice a difference.

craeonics

on Feb 25, 2005

And you're just scratching the surface of your current setup, so this would be a waste of money.

on Feb 25, 2005

I agree. Transfer speed is definitely better, but not worth the upgrade unless it's from much older and much smaller hard drives.

Weaksid

on Feb 25, 2005

For home systems, stay with the IDE unless you are planning on playing alot of games that require fast speeds. But you won't see a difference unless you are using a high end processor, alot of ram, and a high end video card to use that speed.

SATA is mainly for servers. The webserver I'm working on has 2x 80GB SATA on RAID. This is where it would come more in handy. Or you use it for a inhouse file server with several people accessing it.

Cyberworld

on Feb 25, 2005

I got on one PC SATA 80GB with 79GB full and still works like a charm.One old PC i got IDE 40GB and 20GB full and works at half speed SATA does.On the other hand on parents PC i have a 40GB SCSI with 35GB full and goes faster than a rocket!

PurrBall

on Feb 25, 2005

Heck, I have IDE P3. Who needs speed? (Okay, I am getting a new computer with 3GHz soon, gotta go light on the money though.) Wait until you get a new computer. I see you have very little HD space used. You would be wasting MORE than $170.

kona0197

on Feb 25, 2005

Well if you look at the numbers in speed you don't gain much. IDE runs at 133 and SATA runs at 150. I would stick with your current setup till it breaks!

(Meowy - go with AMD lad - save some money!)

Keila

on Feb 25, 2005

Thank you so much all of you. I now realize it would just be a waste of money. Besides, I am also dealing with a brand new computer so even more so.

I always love it with the site when people are more then willing to share there opinions on things. It really helps people get a better idea of products and such.

crofttk

on Feb 25, 2005

I'm totally agreed on all above's advice. For the extreme other side of the coin, incase anyone's interested. I was running out of hard drive space, and things were getting cramped inside my computer case (about 5 year old Dell Dimension XPS) and, frankly, I was worried how hot things were getting in there especially with all the wide ribbon connectors in there.

So, I removed one of my two IDEs and added that to my kids' computer. Then I chucked the ATA controller card, installed a new SATA controller, a new SATA hard drive and put the remaining IDE drive on the SATA controller. PLUS I replaced my remaining wide ribbon connector (i.e., the onboard IDE controller ribbon shared by two CD drives) with two of those new skinny IDE cables -- so the primary and secondary didn't share a ribbon.

What fun ! Seriously...

In any event, there's plenty of breathing room in there now and I have gobs of hard drive space !

FWIW, I can't say I noticed any speed difference due to switching to the SATA interface, but my bus is only 100 MHz and that probably significantly limits my potential benefits.

I'll have to face it, it just seemed so geek I couldn't resist !

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Archangel_Douglas

on Feb 26, 2005

SATA drives here cost about $10 more than IDE drives.. and given a 250 gig SATA Western Digital costs $220, where its IDE counterpart costs $200, i dont think its that bad on the pocket.
plus, ive used up all my IDE bays...

Jafo

on Feb 26, 2005

My setup can handle 8 Ide...2 sata and 2 sata raid ....should be enough for anyone....

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