My first SATA drive

[PhotonWrangler]

Took the leap into SATA this weekend. I have an ASUS Mobo w/onboard SATA controller so I decided what the heck.

Anyone have feedback on their expereinces with SATA vs IDE?

 

[IsaacHayes]

It's fast /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif

 

[jtice]

Good bit faster in most cases.

Mine still has to take a couple secs to bring up my photo folder though.
But then i cant blame it, it contains 16,873 files 358 folders /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/evilgrin07.gif

 

[raggie33]

i have sata raid its so fast

 

[James S]

Speed is great! But you're back at the far end of the price bell curve again, like higher end SCSI drives used to be. But in spite of computer people telling us over and over that you can build a low end PC for $29.95 /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif it's still true that you get what you pay for /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif the smaller cabling I really like too, much easier to deal with internally than those big ribbon cables.

 

[raggie33]

o yeah forgot about the cabling i hate ide cables sata is so much smler

 

[BentHeadTX]

I jumped on the SATA bandwagon two months ago with my new home theater PC build. The SATA drives I picked were the Seagate 7200.8 80GB drive for MCE 2005 operating system and Samsung 160GB for quiet recording of TV shows.

The cabling rocks! I liked it so much that I ordered a rounded IDE cable for my older HP DVD burner. The speed difference is noticable and the price premium is only a couple of bucks.

The difference between the Seagate and Samsung drives speed wise is nil, they are both quick. When it comes to heat the Samsung runs about 2C cooler. The Samsung is also much quieter in operation so it was a good choice for storage of TV programs (don't want to hear the drive when watching programs) I added a Zalman 11 heat pipe cooler/suspension system on the Seagate to cool it a little better and isolate the noise. It works very well and is as cool as the Samsung but still a little louder.

If you have SATA connectors on your mobo, by all means get SATA drives. The smaller cables will give much better airflow and they are a little quicker. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/happy14.gif

 

[PhotonWrangler]

Thanks for all the feedback guys - this is most useful. Raggie, what level of RAID are you running? I'm considering adding a second drive for mirroring.

*Edit a bit later*

So far it does seem faster than an equivalent IDE drive, although I'll probably see a reduction in speed when I add a mirroring drive. I'm using a WD 80GB 7200rpm SATA drive.

Anybody have long term experience with Samsung drives?

 

[BentHeadTX]

Photon,
I read a lot of information about Samsung drives before I bought one. The quality of the drives have jumped up in the last several years and they have a 3 year warranty. Seagate has 5 years and tend to be very reliable so I picked the 80GB single platter for reliability and loaded the operating system on it.
My Samsung gets filled up with TV shows, offloaded to DVD-Rs, defragged and filled again. I have not noted any weirdness when doing this and the drive is cool running and the quietest drive I have ever used.
Western Digital and Maxtor have a 1 year warranty so I passed on those. My Samsung drive has a Nidec motor in it which prove to be more reliable and quieter running. Samsung is now bringing out 250GB drives, they only put up to two platters in their drives for much better reliability, cooler running, quietness and low power use.

 

[eluminator]

newegg.com sells 160GB Samsung SATA for $93. Cool and quiet. I've only had mine a week but so far so good.

PATA is ancient history. The equivalent Samsung PATA sells for $94. It costs you an extra dollar to get last century technology.

 

[raggie33]

i stick with maxotr i only had one fail and i sent it in and in 5 days or so had no drive on door dtep thats fast

 

[Leeoniya]

western digital 40GB 7200rpm IDE vs 10,000rpm dual western digital Raptor sata raid-0 array. (SiL 3112 onboard sata
raid controller...MB = Asus A7N8X-E deluxe)

each drive runs about 100 bucks. mobo is about 75.

nuff said...can anyone say sustained transfer rates?
night and day difference in speed of everything.

i have to say, once you go raid-0 on two 10k rpm sata drives with 5.4ms seeks, you'll never go back. granted the combined capacity is "only" 36gb x 2.

if you have the bucks for the two 74gb raptors ($200 each) they both have 4.5ms seek times. and native command queuing support. which almost makes them SCSI /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Leon

 

[gadget_lover]

How are the SATA about error detection? I'm talking disk errors as well as controller errors.

SCSI drives are real good about detecting and reporting bad data on the drives. ATA drives do not always report when they have bad data. I've had "flaky" computers that tested out fine, but had intermittant bad data reads from the drive. This caused programs to crash for weeks or months, and eventually the disks went totally bad.

Does the SATA drive have any sort of data parity detection and reporting?

Daniel

 

[Leeoniya]

6 months of 24/7 operation. no faults yet. the best controllers are SiL, Promise, and High Point. I hear the Intel matrix RAID controller is ok as well but i'm not too sure.

Leon

 

[raggie33]

maybe ya all can help me with this problem when i ebable sata raid on my pc its a nforce 3 controler on win 2k i get a reboot like once a day. when it int enabled my pc never crashes i mean never it stays on for weeks at a time

 

[BentHeadTX]

Win 2K ?! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsdown.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/huh.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/jpshakehead.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eeew.gif

Sorry about that, had a flashback about 2K hell. Anyway, it could be you need to upgrade the drivers on the mobo to Win 2K specific drivers. I have not heard about any problems with the nForce3 so it is probably not a BIOS issue.

My way of cheating when it came to Win 2K problems was to load XP on the puppy. I would check nVidia's website to see if they have any known issues with your operating system. Good luck!

 

[IsaacHayes]

w2k also is a lot slower on loading anything. And XP has much better (built in) configuration of WiFi. You can make XP look like win2k too (95 style).

 

[PhotonWrangler]

Thanks for the report, Leon. Looks like you have the same mobo that I'm using. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif

The first machine I'm working on is going to be a "serious" business machine and I'm going for reliability rather than access speed, so I'm going to set it up as Raid-1 mirrored drives. The next Sata Raid that I build will be a video machine, so I'll probably set that up as striped drives instead in order to favor throughput.

 

[raggie33]

well darn xp them idiots said i reinsinstaled it to much i always change stuff outa this pc and they think its a new pc. so i cant install it no more im sick a calling microsoft

 

[PhotonWrangler]

[ QUOTE ]
BentHeadTX said:
My Samsung drive has a Nidec motor in it which prove to be more reliable and quieter running.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks for the specifics on the Samsung drives, BentHead. I almost bought a couple of them instead of the WDs, but I wasn't familiar with them yet. Glad to hear that they're turning out a good product.

I wonder if they're using fluid bearings to reduce the noise. I think a lot of the HDs used in the current generation of DVRs are using fluid bearings for this reason.