SATA hard disk drives?

Question

WHATS DIFFERENT BETWEEN THEM AND NORMAL ONES

Answer 1

In the last year, I have slowly transitioned everything in my computer to SATA and here's what I've found:

For one, things are going that way and if you don't have it now, you may wish you did someday. So, if you are buying a new computer, make sure you get the connections for it on the motherboard even if you are not ready for the switch.

As far as I can tell, the drives are the same size, but the cables are smaller.

Older IDE or as they are now called PATA drives and cables are more compatible with everything right now. For example, depending on your motherboard, when you install windows, you may have to press F6 in the beginning and load a driver from a floppy of all things just to get windows to recognize the drive long enough to install itself and then it has no problem recognizing it from windows. I have a SATA DVD burner and I had to plug an old IDE CD rom in temporarily to install windows. This may not be a problem with Vista.

SATA cables are thin and kind of bendable allowing better air flow in your case, but they don't give me that warm fuzzy feeling that they are going to stay connected. They wiggle side to side in their slot.

The specs you see for SATA and SATA II at 150MB/s and 300MB/s are actually specs for the theoretical maximum transfer rate of the wire and the connections on both ends. Old IDE / PATA drives are usually ATA100 or ATA133 which means they can only get up to 100 or 133 MB/s on their connection. For now, none of this matters much because almost everything I do on a computer is typically in the 60-100MB/s range because there are other things in the system that can't go faster (like hard drive heads)

So, when operating 1 drive at a time, you won't see much of a speed boost in SATA over IDE. But, when you need to transfer stuff from 1 SATA drive to another SATA drive, you'll feel the difference. I transfered the data off of my old SATA drive to my new one and I forget how much data or how long it took, but I was ready to go bake a turkey while I waited and it transfered it all so fast that I had to double check it to see if it was real.

Another thing that I have noticed is that with my SATA burner, the memory buffer bars are pegged at almost 100% for the whole burn (it's a good thing :), so I can see that none of my data is bumping heads on it's way to and from my drives.

I also have an external eSATA drive that I got to replace an external USB backup drive that I had and it works like it's inside the case. I got like 20-30 MB/s with USB II and like 50-65 MB/s with eSATA. So, there is a big Improvement there.

Except for this 1 case, I would say that the advantages of SATA are not really the speed today, but reliably today and speed tomorrow. Current technology is starting to bump into the limits of IDE and SATA gives you some headroom.

The disadvantage is compatibility. Some of this stuff is ahead of everything else around it like Operating Systems, legacy backup programs, and other computers. SATA for the most part works with everything, but say you want to upgrade your drive and sell the old one to a buddy and he can't use a sata drive. Or, you have and external eSATA drive and you need to get data from it to something else without it.

Personally I love it, and after a trial with one sata hard drive, I've converted everything to SATA. The price is about the same for either.

It's more bang for the buck.
(which is nice :)

Answer 2

Remember also that it is a serial connection and so only one hard drive per SATA port can be installed.
An IED connection allows the installation of 2 drives on one ribbon cable as master and slave.
Serial ATA is faster, but quite frankly, you probably won't notice the difference. If you use an ATA 100/133 (normal) hard drive, make sure it has 8Mb cache rather than the standard 2Mb. That does make a huge difference.

Answer 3

i believe u mean normal HDD is PATA IDE HDD, sometimes u may see ATA HDD, Ultra ATA HDD, they're PATA (a name given to distinguish from SATA because both of them are IDE).
well, as the name goes, PATA is using a parallel transfer between the board & the HDD at the standard rates of 66.7MBps, 100MBps or 133MBps while SATA is using serial transfer between the board & the HDD at the standard rates of 1.5Gbps or 3.0Gbps.
it can be identified by looking at the connecting end of a HDD & the type of connetor-cable it could connect to. PATA has a big flat ribbon cable connecting to long 40-pin connectors while SATA has a comparably much smaller cable connecting to shorter 7-pin connectors.
optical drives are also using PATA IDE interface while a designated port could host 2 drives but SATA IDE interface has dedicated one HDD to a port.
there're different mother boards for PATA & SATA IDE HDD connection but new motherboard for SATA IDE HDD will always have both types of interface to cater for optical drives which still using PATA IDE connection.
for more complicated details of the specification & standards used in the 2 types of interfaces, u may refer to the sources below.

Definition:
ATA = Advanced Technology Attachment
IDE = Intergrated Drive Electronics

Answer 4

SATA drive are physically smaller then IDE(normal drive)
and speed is faster then IDE(normal drive)

Answer 5

yea xyeslam did pretty much say it all but i'll correct a few things...PATA comes in 66, 100, and 133 MBps(Megabytes per second). and SATA comes in 1.5Gbps(Gigabits per second) or 150MBps and 3.0Gbps or 300MBps transfer rates

Answer 6

I totally agree with the guy in the cool hat.

Answer 7

Faster bus speed than EIDE.

Answer 8

" xyeslam " said it all.

He gets my vote.

regards,
philip T