SATA or not?

[Invalid]

I am ordering some new parts this week and I cannot decide between a SATA HD or a normal IDE interface.

If I get sata do they come with a converter for power? My current power supply has no sata power connectors. If they do not ship with an adapter I need to grab one first.

Beyond this what else would I need if I go the SATA route? A motherboard with SATA is obvious. But is there anything I am not aware of needing?

Thanks for any info. I am a noob on SATA.

[Fibbles]

I am ordering some new parts this week and I cannot decide between a SATA HD or a normal IDE interface.

If I get sata do they come with a converter for power? My current power supply has no sata power connectors. If they do not ship with an adapter I need to grab one first.

Beyond this what else would I need if I go the SATA route? A motherboard with SATA is obvious. But is there anything I am not aware of needing?

Thanks for any info. I am a noob on SATA.
If you buy the drives in OEM flavor, they won't come with anything but the drives. You'll need both power adaptors and data cables. If you buy them in their full retail package, they will probably comes with all nessecary cables. It really depends on a few factors to get SATA working. With my board (Abit IC7 Maxx3), all I did was hook up the drives to the board, turn it on, and install Windows. Everything was recognized and I had no problems. I had been dreading the install however. Almost everyone I know has had issues with their SATA and has needed to load drivers from a floppy before the Windows install (when setup asks if any 3rd party support is needed).

[Darv]

SATA is great. Mostly from a cable routing point. SATA cables are so much smaller than IDE cables.

You won't notice any speed difference between the two interfaces though.

Oh and I had no problems installing my HDD, although it doesn't recognise it when I restart. I don't do that too often so I've not bothered to fix it yet :wacko:

[Fibbles]

SATA is great. Mostly from a cable routing point. SATA cables are so much smaller than IDE cables.

You won't notice any speed difference between the two interfaces though.

Oh and I had no problems installing my HDD, although it doesn't recognise it when I restart. I don't do that too often so I've not bothered to fix it yet :wacko:
With my WD Raptor, Windows loads really fast, but I haven't noticed anything else that would make me want to buy another one :huh:

So what happens when you restart? Do you need to do something funky? I've noticed that when I turn the computer on, during the post process it takes a while for both of my SATA drives to be detected. When I had my IDE drive, it was detected right away :mellow:

[fillip]

I can't wait for the SATA 300 drives to start appearing, then we'll notice a difference in speed. http://wizdforums.co.uk/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[Darv]

With my WD Raptor, Windows loads really fast, but I haven't noticed anything else that would make me want to buy another one :huh:

So what happens when you restart? Do you need to do something funky? I've noticed that when I turn the computer on, during the post process it takes a while for both of my SATA drives to be detected. When I had my IDE drive, it was detected right away :mellow:
It gets to the bit to detect the HDD and it just stops and doesn't go any further. Only happens when I reset it, not when I first turn it on. I've read something about it somewhere but since it doesn't bother me too much I haven't taken the time to fix it.

In your bios can you set it to boot from SATA first? Don't know why it would take longer :unsure:

[Starbuck3733T]

If you buy the drives in OEM flavor, they won't come with anything but the drives. You'll need both power adaptors and data cables. If you buy them in their full retail package, they will probably comes with all nessecary cables. It really depends on a few factors to get SATA working. With my board (Abit IC7 Maxx3), all I did was hook up the drives to the board, turn it on, and install Windows. Everything was recognized and I had no problems. I had been dreading the install however. Almost everyone I know has had issues with their SATA and has needed to load drivers from a floppy before the Windows install (when setup asks if any 3rd party support is needed).

I think some of the SATA implementations emulate something _else_ with the normal drivers, then go to 'enhanced' mode when the regular ones are loaded. The dells at work are like this, as opposed to my NF7-v2.

[Invalid]

Hmm. All these problems and no real positives are making me think I should just go with IDE. I don't have a floppy in my main rig so if I needed one for the drivers I would be screwed.

[ỒĊBłůē]

In your bios can you set it to boot from SATA first? Don't know why it would take longer :unsure:
With the Max3 you can set HDD priority in the BIOS which seems to display all connected drives (probably other than those on the highpoint controller as it's BIOS appears after.)

Could the BIOS be checking for a SATA RAID array mounted or summat? :huh:

I'd go with the SATA route - but as with everthing there's always something better just around the corner. (AMD FX-57 anyone?)

[EDIT: - Might make sense now]

[fillip]

You may aswell go for SATA since there's little difference in price between that and PATA. But as OCBlue says, SATA 300 is not too far away.

[toby]

I don't trust SATA, don't ask me why(because i dont really know)

[Psykotik]

Unless you're buying Seagate SATA drives, you'll have the standard molex power plug present anyhoo, so power is not an issue.

I've been using Raptors on all of my machines since the beginning of last year as they are absolutely stunning in comparison to a regular drive (from button press to desktop in under 10 seconds anyone?) but they are not so hot for capacity.

Unless you're going for a Raptor, go PATA

Andy :)

[fillip]

Bit of a luddite Toby? http://wizdforums.co.uk/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[toby]

change is bad!i like my IDE drives with their comforting grey cables none of this shonky sata malarky

[ỒĊBłůē]

as the kid in the McD advert says - Change is good!

(and I'm not on about reshaped pieces of chicken sweepings)

[Fibbles]

If I was going for the HD's again, I'd go for 2 Maxtor 300's, the ones with 16mb caches. I've not noticed any performance difference between it and my Raptor (I could be doing something wrong) and it's 279 usable MB's!

SATA cables are so much easier to route. I ended up buying a sleeved dual power connector doohicky that made it very easy to chain them up.

Go SATA!!!

[OT] I've been thinking of selling my Raptor and only using my 300. Since everyone is always eager to claim MAxtor's fail, my Iomega Rev drive can hold around 80 gigs of compressed data, and 32 native. Then I could save 20 Euros on a dual Silentstar HD and grab the single.

[zer0]

well i can tell you that if you buy a motherboard with sata support im 99.9% shure it will come with everything you need to use sata drives. (data cables and power addapters) if it dosent come with a power adapter send me an email and ill grab mine and ship it too you for free) i use sata and find that its much easyer to deal with the biggest part being that its easy to hook up and although you guys might not knotice a diffrence i have between a 1 and 3 second gain in boot up and aobut a 1 second gain when loading games. (of corse some of that is my ext3 file system utalizing the higher bandwidth of the sata channel in a better way than ntfs or fat. windows setup will go flawless however there is a slightly diffrent system when setting up linux where your drive is normaly hda for first drive and hdb for second drive its sda for first drive and sdb for second but i dont think your a "linux" type of guy (even though it has a shorter learning cerve then windows[its a known fact])

anyways go do sata.

(then again sata drives cost about 1.5x more than ide so if your short on cash i think ide would be the way to go)

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

Zer0 do you use Linux via CLI or GUI?

[zer0]

bash is my friend :P

i set my system up entirely from the command line afterwords i setup x and gnome so i mostly use xterm inside of gnome right now (even though i screwed up some stuff and have to re format here soon (in dreading it)

just so you know im useing gentoo witch is thouight of as one of the hardest linux distros to install as its all in the command line and most people who just started useing linux arnt very good with the command line (though it has a guide that if you folow word by word you will get a perfect install.)

and if you need any help im very willing to assist with any issues you might be haveing.

im profisiant with fedora/redhat gentoo and many general linux systems (X.org, gnome, grub)

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

I've only ever used linux at college and back then it was pretty much all command line. i think the only GUI was xwindows or something and it was pretty new i believe. Our teacher was pretty crap too so we all hated doing the linux stuff so i have avoided it since then.

[zer0]

yeah x windows is a gui its most commonly known as X.org and X Free (X.org is a newer branch from xfree and is progressing quite nicely) gnome and kde go on top of X. we should move this to another thread if you want to contenu to talk linux.

also check out http://wizdforums.co.uk/showthread.php?p=18861

[raven98030]

I like SATA I have one in my computer and I am going too up grade my mother board I would like 3 or 4 SATA port.

[Starbuck3733T]

Welcome to the board Raven! say hello in the hellos and intros thread in general discussion!

[raven98030]

Thank you very much.