Hard drives; pata vs sata

[s37d]

I have a system with 3 hard drives:

1) WD 120GB 7200rpm PATA
2) WD 160GB 7200rpm SATA
3) WD 160GB 7200rpm SATA

The first one, the 120gb PATA, is my boot drive. I run Windows off this and all my games.

My question is, if changed my main boot drive from the PATA to one of the SATAs, and reinstalled all games on it, would I see an improvement in speed with games or Windows? Mobo is pretty old, asus p4p800s. Thanks

 

[jay_bo]

No you wouldn't see an improvement in games, memory and graphics card would, as the memory would speed your system up. But like you say your mobo is old so might not be able to support much memory and might not support certain graphics cards. Swapping your hard drive will only improve data transfer rates, due to it been ATA but i dont think you would really notice it enough, for the hassle of swaping them.

Hope this helps

 

[peterhuang913]

You won't see much of an improvement.

 

[s37d]

K thanks. I'm fine on ram, have 2 gigs of Patriot ddr400 2-3-2-5 and an ati x1650. The most demanding game I play is WoW, so there's really no problem with my setup. I know that using a Raptor hard drive helps when you Fraps stuff in WoW, since it writes much faster, but I guess going from a PATA to SATA of the same rpm doesn't really help.

 

[jay_bo]

No it doesnt help much, i didnt think WOW was such a high spec game, my mate plays that.

 

[veedubfreak]

It might boot a bit faster and load the games a bit faster, but other than load times, the hard drives arent going to affect much.