What is the main differences between IDE , SCSI and SATA hard drives?

Answer 1

Hello,

(ANS) Its NOT so much the differences that are important but to understand the advantages or uses of each kind of technology. Each of these technologies has advantages and limitations.

**IDE (intergrated Drive Electronics) This has been around for many years now and is still used and is a well tried and well tested technology. IDE has the HDD's electronics built onto or into the drive unit itself. The main limitation is that with IDE you only x2 channels to connect to the PC motherboard, so the number of drives that can be attached is somewhat limited. The maximum number of drives is I think x4 (x2 master drives plus x2 slaved drives).

**SCSI (small computer systems interface) This has historically been used for servers and NOT for the home or PC desktop market. This is used because unlike IDE with the SCSI interface you can diasy chain as many as 7-15 drives off the SCSI system. This means that you can potentially have a large amount of data storage i.e you can have drive arrays (which you cannot have with IDE). Also SCSI is faster and highly reliable which is another reason it became popular in business but it has always been more expensive than IDE though.

**SATA (seriel ATA, or seriel advanced technology attachment), This is the newest form of technology used in computers for transfering data to and from the HDD. It has a faster data transfer rate then previous drive technologies, a wider data path and hence a faster data tranfer rate than before. This means its far more well suited to the faster CPU's and local bus now found in the latest computers.

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Answer 2

Hard drives are all essentially the same, the difference between IDE, SATA and SCSI is the interface in which they connect to the PC.
IDE is an older standard that is slowly being replaced by SATA. SCSI is usually found in higher end machines or servers that require high data availability and a larger mean time between failures.

Answer 3

SATA is an evolutionary version of IDE, SATA uses potentially longer snaky serial cable the other is restricted to shorter yet having to need heavy shielding ribbon cable parallel wires that is also unflexible, otherwise more or less the same.

SCSI is a different beast altogether, the components making up a complete SCSI system is completely different and targeted to a server needs.

Performance wise: IDE is worst, SCSI best, SATA in between.

Answer 4

Scsi Or Sata

Answer 5

Basically, speed and the maximum number if drives you can have. SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy") is faster than IDE and SATA is faster than both of them. IDE has 2 channels, each with a master and slave, making a maximum of 4. SCSI can have 128! (Theoretically). SATA has 2 channels, but can only have one drive per channel.

Answer 6

Administrators are must choose between a newer, more exciting technology or an existing, proven one. When it comes to servers, many admins now face the choice of going with the new serial ATA (SATA) hard drive and the existing SCSI standard.

Its lower cost and new features make SATA attractive, but SCSI continues to be the gold standard for server hardware for a reason.

SATA is a new version of the ATA/Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) drive standard used for years in desktop hard drives and removable drives such as CD/DVD drives. ATA drives have always been inexpensive and easy to work with, but they have lagged behind SCSI drives in terms of performance. SATA goes a long way toward closing that gap.

SATA: The good news


SATA is less expensive than SCSI. Both the drives and the hardware itself -- the controllers and cables -- are much less expensive than SCSI. For those building a server on a budget, this is appealing. A SATA RAID array will usually be much cheaper to build than a SCSI array of the same capacity. For instance, for $175 you can get either a 36 GB, 10,000 rpm enterprise-class SCSI drive or a 200 GB, 7,200 rpm SATA drive.

There's no significant speed difference. Under ideal conditions, SATA RAID arrays have been clocked at 90-95% of the speed of a comparable SCSI array. The standalone drives also perform almost nearly as well.

SATA is easier to manage, physically. Both the data and power connectors to SATA drives consist of much thinner cables that are easier to manage than what SCSI drives use. The thinner cable mean fewer airflow problems. In addition, SATA cables can run up to one meter in length without signal problems.
However, there are downsides to SATA -- or upsides to SCSI drives.

SATA drives are still not built to the same standards as enterprise SCSI drives. They aren't made for the kind of heavy use that an enterprise-class SCSI drive is built to take, which includes the amount of data shunted through it and mechanical failures and surface defects. In general, SATA drives are considered desktop-class drives and do not have warranties for more than one to three years.

SATA's command standard isn't enterprise-class. SCSI uses a method of optimizing data called "command queuing," which allows the controller to execute requests for data from the drive in the best possible order. On a server, where dozens if not hundreds of users may be placing requests at once, the disk controller can turn into a serious bottleneck if the hardware doesn't have some low-level method of dealing with multiple simultaneous requests (as does SCSI). SATA is at best a poor man's implementation of this technology.

SATA uses the CPU for managing data flow; SCSI doesn't. SATA's reliance on the CPU for managing its data flow is a legacy inheritance from the ATA/IDE standard. SCSI controllers offload the management of data flow to the controller's own dedicated hardware, which means faster overall throughput. While the amount of CPU load that SATA imposes on the system is nowhere near what it used to be in the older ATA/IDE standards, there is still the overhead required to go to and from the CPU -- and that's CPU power and bus bandwidth best devoted to other things.

SATA drives require dedicated power connectors. This may be nitpicking, but in some cases it's a key consideration: SATA drives won't work with conventional drive power connectors. The power supply for the system needs to have dedicated SATA power connectors or a converter for same (they run about $10 each).
In short, SATA is best for simple, single-disk servers and desktop and workstation configurations that can benefit from disk-striping setups, such as multimedia editing stations. At this point, it's really not suited for use in enterprise-class servers.

SCSI is the best choice for high availability and durability rather than performance per se. The performance is definitely there; it's just that SCSI is engineered more to be fault-tolerant.

Spend your money on SCSI and rest easy. SATA does make an appealing alternative to low-end (i.e., desktop) SCSI setups, which have been more or less eclipsed by ATA/IDE as a whole for some time now and should flourish nicely there.

Serial ATA (SATA) is a drive interface designed to replace the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. The storage world has been buzzing about SATA drives for years, debating how it stacks up against other technologies.

Users of the SATA interface are benefiting from greater speed, simpler upgradeable storage devices and easier configuration. While SATA drives don't match the performance of Fibre Channel (FC) hard drives, they provide the low cost per gigabyte and high storage densities crucial for "near-line" storage tasks such as performing backups and archiving.

Answer 7

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Answer 8

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