Re: Hard Drives

[Doogie Brodie <ukhad@xxxxxxx>]

Rob Mouser wrote:
> I want to get myself a couple of 160gb (Or perhaps bigger) hard
drives.
>
> Will be going in my Dell Dimension, P4 PC (12 months old maybe) but
> thinking of upgrading at some point.
>
> I keep seeing references to SATA or Serial ATA drives, could someone
> enlighten me to how they differ to IDE drives and if it's a better
> choice? Will they only work on newer Mobos?

A quick scan of this article (August 02) seems to be a good background:-
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20020812/index.html

The features in brief:

* 150 MByte/s maximum transfer rate (300/600 MByte/s envisioned for
the future)
* Hot-plugging capability
* Two power saving modes: partial and slumber
* Overlapping (commands)
* Tagged command queueing
* Seven-wire data cable. Connectors measure just 8 mm wide.

Although the article finishes with

"From the performance perspective, there is nothing to be gained from
changing over to Serial ATA. The next generation of disk drives from
Seagate, Maxtor, and WD and Co. is just around the corner, and it will
still be well served by UltraATA/100. Anyone considering Serial ATA is
more likely to be swayed by the robustness of its data handling and by
the price of Serial ATA drives being pitted against that of conventional
ATA disk drives."
It was written over a year ago, so things might have moved on on these
points...  certainly the diamondmax 9 that was reviewed by tomshardware
in march this year was "Reaching well over 100 MB/s"

You will need either a mobo that supports Serial ATA or a PCI card to
hang the drives off.

> Drives will be for media storage (Wav etc.) only.

For storage, you're not likely to notice much difference - if hot swap
is something that would be useful to you then maybe, or if you were
putting in a stack of drives and wanted neater cabling (yeah, I know you
can get rounded IDEs :p ) I'd be inclined to look at the cheapest
option, since you're unlikely to get much added value from SATA in your
application.

HTH
--
Doogie