Serial ATA vs. IDE, in layman's terms.

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glennl

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the system i just built has Serial ATA capability. is this for hard drives? if so, what are the advantages over IDE? performance? cost? nothing? any info appreciated.
 
They have to do with the interface between your computer and the harddrives.

Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata

That being said, the actual hard drive also plays a big factor in determining the performance of your system.

For my next system, which I will build soon, I will actually buy an IDE harddrive. When I have more money, I am planning on getting 2 74GB Raptors in Raid 0 (sata), and using my original IDE drive as an external backup. The performance for a 7200 rpm shouldn't be that different for SATA and IDE IMO.
 
glennl said:
the system i just built has Serial ATA capability. is this for hard drives? if so, what are the advantages over IDE? performance? cost? nothing? any info appreciated.

If you have more than one hard drive, SATA becomes pretty useful. If you only one HD, SATA wont really give you a performance increase over and IDE. The price these days is pretty comparable. IDE drives are easier to set up.
 
sata give a higher bandwidth compared to IDE. but if u only have 1 hard drive on the IDE channel ul have 133mb/s of bandwidth even though the drive will only be able to read at about 60-70mb/s so the extra that SATA gives u isnt used yet. so the only advantages of SATA is the small cables for ur cases airflow and the ease of setting up raid so u can have more than one hard drive running as one. (search its been explained loads of times before on here if u duno what raid is/how it works)
 
SATA drives are easiest to setup (especially if you have a mobo that natively supports SATA, which most new boards do). The performance increase is consistent whether you have one or more drives in the system. They're priced comparable to IDE drives, and will soon be replacing them as the standard.
 
Serial ATA also transfers one bit at a time, as it is serial communication, IDE is parallel communication which transfers eight bits at a time.

So essentially Serial ATA(SATA) can move data faster one bit at a time and easier to setup, looks alot nice then a big bulky cable, and soon wll completely replace IDE :)
 
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