Can anyone tell me detailed information and comparison about these 3 HDD: PATA@ATA, SATA, and IDE?

Question

Thank you for helping!!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 1

I just want to say don't listen to Wildcat747. First of all its not 33 66 and 133 ms seek time. That doesnt even make sense -- thats saying that the faster drives have a longer seek time....

PATA also called ATA, IDE and EIDE, is 100 and 133 Mb/s. That's Mega-bits per second (8 bits to a byte). As in transfer rate from drive to motherboard. And it uses the flat ribbon cables as I think all responders have already said. (Note there are also round IDE cables, but they just bundle all the wires and are still bulky and annoying compared to SATA cables.

SATA drives come in two different transfer rates and Wildcat747.didn't even get the numerical values even close to right on this one. They come in either 1.5Gb/s or 3Gb/s. (1500Mb/s or 3000Mb/s) -- And they use nice small cables.

Seek time, since Wildcat747, brought it up -- doesn't really even have to do with SATA/PATA. SATA and PATA are just interface types for hard disks -- in other words -- how they attach to your motherboard - and this determines the transfer speed the disk gets. Seek time is the average amount of time it takes the drive to access a random "address" on the disk. This is more dependent on the whats inside the disk and not the interface. As a general rule of thump the higher the RPM's the faster the seek time. Common rotational speeds for both PATA and SATA are 5400 and 7200. 10,000 is available in both as well, but tends to be on the higher end. And as far as what a reasonable seek time is... anything above 10ms seek time is outrageously bad -- I cant image what a hard disk with a 166ms seek time would be like!!

The links below will tell you about both.

One last thing to note - if your looking at getting a new hard drive for your computer. If your computer is fairly old, you would most likely need to get a SATA expansion card so you could plug it into your motherboard. Also, SATA and PATA drives have different power connectors. And while all power supplies have conectors for PATA, many still do not have connectors for SATA. Although you can get adapters for rather cheap so you dont need a whole new power supply.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Attachment


Also -- while RAID0 can increase your performace, it is because of the doubled transfer speed, and not because of a "halfed" seek time --- which in reality, the seek time is not affected whatsoever by RAID, and if anything at all it would be increased. But even if it were reduced in most modern day PC situations, transfer speed in much more important to you than seek time. Not to down play seek time, it is a factor -- just not so much as transfer speed -- and seek time certainly is not affected by RAID.

And as far as SCSI goes -- thats really just for servers -- I am a full blown computer geek (can u tell) and I don't use SCSI drives because while they may still be somewhat faster than SATA, it's a good deal more expensive.

p.s. Wildcat747 - i hope you take offense to this -- I hate people like you who go around spewing corrupted knowledge, while purposely stating exact facts (nonfacts) to make it sound like you know what your talking about so people will pick your answer as best. Not only do you spew misinformation, but you make it harder to get good answers because people tend to not answer once there are already a few answers. And I know it's not just this one time because your other answers are BS too. For gods sake -- if your going to play Yahoo Answers like a game, atleast dont cheat, by acting extremely knowledgeable about stuff that your not.

Answer 2

For Pata I can't help but can guess but here's the scoop for the other drives, ATA drives are the standard drives most compute uses they have a bus speed of 33 66 133 milia second seek speed if ran on a test system, they use a standard flat ribon cable the faster the drive the more wires it uses and the more information can be sent thru the processor. The Satadrive is a sieral drive and it's starting speed is 166 Ms bus speed it is the fastest drive around right now if you connect it to a raid card 0 striped 1 you cna in theroy double the seek sped of the drives so if you have two your buss seek speed would be 332 milia second speed, since the hard drive is the slowst part of the computer the faster you can raise the bus speed on the drive the faster you can make the computer. IDE drives are the same as ata and uses a flat cable you can get more detailed information but there is one more that you did not ask for and that drive needs to have a controller card where the other drives have the map cards on the drive and is intragal, they do not have problems with losing information and having bad sectors like they used to have with the other type drives.SCSI is a more advance interface than IDE (interface used for mass storage devices that are non SCSI). SCSI also has several advantages over IDE, which makes it preferable in high-end computers. The average access time for a SCSI hard drive is about 7.1-7.5 m/s. But with the advance technology come a price. SCSI is much more expansive than a UDMA hard drive. but not that much faster anymore, go to this page for more information

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mkotra1/403mjk/project/harddrive_select.htm

Answer 3

PATA and SATA are both forms of IDE. The older drives which were called simply IDE and also EIDE are the same as PATA.

PATA is a parallel drive. They are drives that use the parallel flat ribbon cables.

SATA is a serial drive. It uses the smaller cables. SATA is faster than PATA.

Answer 4

heres some good info http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/IDE-SATA-PATA-Which-Type-of-Hard-Disk-Should-I-Buy_W0QQugidZ10000000000921687?ssPageName=BUYGD:CAT:-1:LISTINGS:1