SATA or PATA drive?

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rsachoc

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Hi guys

I am buying a new drive, around 250gig, and was wondering if I should go for a SATA or PATA drive. The drive I am looking at is a Seagate 250gig, available in both flavours. My board also has a SATA connector, so this isnt a problem?

Any help appreciated
 
Rather go SATA. Bear in mind you can only have one drive per channel with SATA, as opposed to the 2 drives per channel for PATA.
 
IF you have the choice go for the SATA drive. IDE drives are the older generation. I have two identical Seagate 160GB drives. One is SATA and one is PATA/IDE. No real performance difference just smaller cables and a newer interface.
 
-sata is supposed to be faster than pata
-sata is hot swap-able(not sure how to spell...)
-also make sure u have the power connectors for sata.
-the min amount of sata connections today is like 2, so that means u can have theoretically 6 drives...
-if u can go for western digital drives! - they are the best, but ya might pay a little more fir it than the seagate.
..............
 
nothin is wrong with seagate drives tho, i hav only used them and no prob's

EDIT: touch wood
 
photonman said:
-sata is supposed to be faster than pata
-sata is hot swap-able(not sure how to spell...)
-also make sure u have the power connectors for sata.
-the min amount of sata connections today is like 2, so that means u can have theoretically 6 drives...
-if u can go for western digital drives! - they are the best, but ya might pay a little more fir it than the seagate.
..............
Click to expand...

1. The SATA interface is faster but it will make no real difference because PATA runs at either 100 or 133MB. HD's only get up to around 60MB max. SATA runs at 150 and even the WD Raptor drives only get up to around 75MB/s

2. DONT BUY WESTERN DIGITAL, I have had many friends WD's fail on them. The only WD's worth taking a look at are the Raptors but then again the 400GB Seagate is pretty much just as fast.

I have been running Seagate drives for around 10 years. Never had any problems because of the drive. Did lose all my Data once becuase windows didn't support the 160GB drive, only supported up to 128GB. (The LBA patch for windows did fix this though) SATA does not have this limitation though.
 
Segate Baracuda vs Western Digital SATA's:

I've got 2 machines with identical configurations.
When initially setup, they were both 2 80GB Baracuda's.
I purchased 2 more WD's and about 4 months later, one the one machine the Baracuda started reporting massive amounts of bad sectors, then about a month later the other machine had similar carp with the WD drive.
Now that's just wierd in my book, but it does make a point - sometimes they throw in a couple of duds in the box that they send to RSA.

Make sure you can swap the drive's back[with the supplier], and make sure you're mirroring.
 
OK!

Thanks guys, will definately go SATA then, gonna go home and check I have a SATA drive cable and power cable. Think I got one with my board. I have heard things about my board and SATA support, hopefully I will not have any problems.

The Seagate's have a 5 year warranty, which I think is pretty good.

Thanks!
 
hey angellus, maybe i just got the bad apple amongst the lot of seagates

ive found Western digitals to be the most stable.

ive had a problem the with maxtor 160gb the most...ive had 3 already and some how or another they start actin up...ie: boot write errors etc
 
photonman said:
hey angellus, maybe i just got the bad apple amongst the lot of seagates

ive found Western digitals to be the most stable.

ive had a problem the with maxtor 160gb the most...ive had 3 already and some how or another they start actin up...ie: boot write errors etc
Click to expand...

I have to say t he only HD's I have ever had have been Seagates. My friends have had WD, Maxtor and Hitachi. I am the only one who has never had a hardware related failure. Maybe I am just really lucky. If WD works for you then great but I have heard to many bad things about them.

The Raptor Drives are great though.
 
Well one thing about SATA is OS... for example they do not work for Windows 98

Seagates are OK... They went through a rough patch a little while back, story goes they opened a new factory and had problems with drives going down, again rumour has it the five year warranty was to try and get people (and dealers) back

I must admit I am not a great fan of Western Digital drives, but as with anything, if you have vital data or a complicated set-up remember the four rules of back-up - They are Back-up Back-Up and BACK UP (and don't forget to verify)

Regarding ATA 100 and above - While it is true that a drive's sustained data transfer will not go above 60 Megs a second, the cache RAM is capable of working at these speeds and while this is small (2 - 8 megs) combined with the sustained transfer it is capable of give bursts of high speed transfer that taper off after a few seconds. This will make a system very zippy when handling a cluster of files of say about 50 - 60 megs - But would be of no advantage for a system that requires sustained data transfer, for example a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) or Video Production System
 
I've only had good experiences with Seagates - I've had one bad drive from them, but a warranty swap out sorted that. I've had a couple of WD's fail on me (out of warranty, typically).
All in all, I'd say that Seagate drives are the most reliable. Stay far away from Maxtor. Everybody I know that has had Maxtor drives has had them fail.
 
photonman said:
-sata is supposed to be faster than pata
Click to expand...
At the moment I have not seen it in my own testing. Possibly with SATA2 or 3 it should get faster

photonman said:
-the min amount of sata connections today is like 2, so that means u can have theoretically 6 drives...
Click to expand...
I have this odd memory that SATA is daisy chainable, much like USB. In such as case there is likely a much higher limit than 6.

photonman said:
-if u can go for western digital drives! - they are the best, but ya might pay a little more fir it than the seagate
Click to expand...
I stake my name behind Seagate. That being said, currently I have a WD 250Gb SATA that has been running for almost a year now without a problem. It did come from a batch of 20 I purchased at the time, and to date 8 have gone back to be swopped out. Admittidly the bulk are being used in fairly high usage enviroments where is mine is just in my personal machine.

rsachoc said:
I am buying a new drive, around 250gig, and was wondering if I should go for a SATA or PATA drive. The drive I am looking at is a Seagate 250gig, available in both flavours. My board also has a SATA connector, so this isnt a problem?
Click to expand...
I would go SATA, not just from all the technical points but also from the point that buying it means you are showing support for it over PATA. This means manufacturers and suppliers will be more likely to focus on SATA than PATA and hopefully we will move away from PATA quicker.
 
stoke said:
sometimes they throw in a couple of duds in the box that they send to RSA.
Click to expand...

That's just silly nonsense. Anytime you mass produce something as intricate as a hard drive there are going to be some that go bad.

Make sure you can swap the drive's back[with the supplier], and make sure you're mirroring.
Click to expand...

You can swap any drive that is under warranty as long as there is no external damage or signs of tampering. Seagate drives have a 5 year warranty.
 
rsachoc said:
Hi guys

I am buying a new drive, around 250gig, and was wondering if I should go for a SATA or PATA drive. The drive I am looking at is a Seagate 250gig, available in both flavours. My board also has a SATA connector, so this isnt a problem?

Any help appreciated
Click to expand...

You probably won't see any performance difference. You can only connect one SATA drive per connector. If you have a parallel interface as well you can always add more drives later since the serial and parallell will co-exist.

SATA's cable is a good thing and a bad thing - it is thin and so doesn't get in the way like the old ribbon cables, but the downside is that the connector is poor and can come loose at the drop of a hat.

Internally SATA drives are generally exactly the same as PATA.

If you can you might as well get a SATA drive with Native Command Queuing.
 
noxibox said:
the connector is poor and can come loose at the drop of a hat.
Click to expand...
Odd I've used SATA for over a year and not had this issue and my box gets lugged around and bumped quite a bit
 
One thing I must point out, while a Seagate drive might have a Five year warranty to the Dealer, the Dealer or retail outlet might not pass this benefit onto the customer

Check with who you are purchasing from WHAT IS THE LENGTH OF YOUR WARRANTY - Do not assume that it will be five years

One of the reasons dealers shorten the term of warranties to customers is the cost of transporting the drive back to the supplier (you can guess some of the others)

Another thing to watch out for is FULL WARRANTY and Limited Warranty. Under Limited warranty you might for example find that you are covered for the first year, but in the second and third years you would have to pay in X amount. Again check what you are buying before you buy it. Let the Buyer Beware!!!
 
DragonLogos said:
One thing I must point out, while a Seagate drive might have a Five year warranty to the Dealer, the Dealer or retail outlet might not pass this benefit onto the customer
Click to expand...
The Seagate 5 year warrenty is from manufacter date, not from purchase date. Just be careful with that
 
noxibox said:
SATA's cable is a good thing and a bad thing - it is thin and so doesn't get in the way like the old ribbon cables, but the downside is that the connector is poor and can come loose at the drop of a hat.
Click to expand...

My new Gigabyte K8N-SLI board has "SATA II" connectors - it's basically the same thing, except the cables have little metal clips that lock on to the socket, so the cable doesn't come loose anymore. The cables lock quite nicely onto a standard SATA socket.

It's backwards compatible with normal SATA sockets.

If you took a look at that 4 card SLI thread, the board photo has those sockets - they're yellow.
 
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