SATA vs. IDE? Pros and Cons with Windows XP?

Answer 1

SATA, provided your motherboard has native connections. It will eventually replace IDE as the de facto standard for connecting hard and optical drives. It has a much higher data throughput than IDE has.

However, if your mothboard doesn't have SATA connections on board, stick with IDE. Expansion cards work, but than you're stuck with the limitations of the PCI bus.

The only pros I can say for Windows XP: I've noticed setups running SATA hard drives (when using a properly installed and maintained OS) have a much faster boot time. Data transfers are much faster on SATA. Cable is much smaller, and therefore in theory can promote better airflow.

Answer 2

From a practical standpoint- both are fine. SATA is newer and supports theoretically faster throughput, but it's not something where you're likely to actually see any difference in everyday use- it's just benchmark numbers. If you're building a database server that's one thing, but for a desktop PC- doesn't matter.

Of course many vendors are primarily stocking SATA drives now, so you may have difficultly finding IDE drives on the shelves (if say, you wanted to add a 2nd one later). But you might find IDE drives at a pretty nice discount as a result.

Many motherboards support RAID with SATA drives which is a nice feature. And SATA uses different power cables, so it's less likely you'll run out of connectors to your power supply when you add that 2nd DVD-RW drive or whatnot.

Windows XP doesn't care which one you use- no pros or cons from that standpoint.

Answer 3

SATA: Newest technology. Supports larger hard drives, faster access, hot-plugging (with the right controller) and more drives in hardware RAID. The only con is that you may need to buy a SATA controller if your mobo doesn't have one.

IDE: Older technology. More compatible with older hardware. No other real advantge to it.

Answer 4

lol, there's no cons. for the SATA, everything is good(faster, cooler, thin cables, you can find the same amount of gigs in the SATA and IDE, other thing the SATA runs at 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s and IDE dont get even close to that..

Answer 5

Parallel ATA drives connected by the Integrated Drive Electronics interface offer slower performance and are a bottleneck in performance compared to SATA drives.

Answer 6

SATA: 3Gbps transfer rate
Faster data transfer when it comes to usb-sata as sata behaves as a usb device
Larger storage spaces
Different connectors
Has internal cache
IDE: Transfer rate is slow
Cache has to be auto allocated
Data transfer is slow