Serial ATA Versus IDE? 2

[chrigil]

I have been looking into the differences between SATA and IDE and have realised that the obvious better choice is SATA.

However can someone enlighten me as to the following.

1) Do I need a motherboard with a SATA connector as the leads seem to be different or do most new Mobo's have both connectors?

2) Are there any issues with SATA such as installing windows etc. I heard somewhere that it isn't as easy to install windows on a SATA drive. Is this true or is my memory playing ticks on me again lol?

3) Presumably I'd be better off using a SATA drive on a server and spending a bit more? Should I view the minimal expense as an investment?

Thanks in advance,

Chris

 

[cdogg]

In regards to speed, there isn't a huge difference between SATA and IDE for a single drive. It's when you plan on using more than 2 drives in a RAID configuration does the speed factor slide into SATA's favor.

1) Yes, almost every new motherboard has them. There are PCI cards you can buy, but PCI is not as efficient and is capped at 133MB/s (below the SATA spec) sharing that bandwidth and Southbridge access with other PCI devices.

2) Sure, there can be issues. Usually there isn't though, especially with top name brand motherboards. The SATA connection is recognized and initiated by the BIOS. Windows setup can see it and installs a generic driver to access the drive. Things run fine all the way through installation. It's once your finished where you might notice a lot of slowness due to the generic driver that Windows is using. You have to then go out and install the latest SATA driver for your mobo inside Windows (get it from the mobo manufacturer's website).

3) Price difference between the two is almost non-existent.

All the advice above is based on first-generation SATA drives. 2nd generation drives include additional features such as NCQ (Native Command Queueing) which help to speed up access times. In some benchmarks, 2nd-generation drives can outperform IDE and 1st-gen by as much as 15%.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
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