Re: PATA sometimes faster than SATA?

In article
news:<852d3089-e9e4-414e-8fc7-b9f13f8faa64@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
, A. J. Moss wrote:
A computer I'm looking at has an Abit NF7-S2 motherboard (socket A)
and a 300GB Seagate 7200.8 hard disk (ATA-100). I'm considering
swapping the hard disk for a SATA-150 one of the same type and
capacity.

Why?

If you're doing this because you hope the SATA disk will be faster I
suspect you're in for a disappointment -- regardless of PCI bus
bandwidth issues. Most hard drives can't supply data to the SATA/PATA
bus fast enough to saturate the bus ... so even though an ATA100 PATA
disk has only 2/3 of the theoretical data rate of a SATA-150 drive
you'll probably only see the same throughput of data in practice.

If you were thinking of getting a very high performance SATA drive,
like a WD Raptor (which has very low track-track seek times, because
it's based on WD's SCSI disk design rather than an IDE design) then you
might benefit from quicker disk seeks with the SATA drive (I don't
think there are PATA Raptors).

If your typical usage is such that data requests from the disks very
often happen to be satisfied from cache, rather than requiring a
physical disk access, then you might see an increase in throughput with
the SATA drive.

If your PATA drive is sharing an IDE cable with another drive (either
an optical drive or another hard drive) and both are used at the same
time, so there is contention for the bandwidth on the IDE cable, then
moving one of the drives to another connector might give you an
improvement in overall disk access.

Otherwise, I doubt that you would notice the difference in practice.

Of course, you might have other reasons for wanting to change drives,
and the performance questions might be coincidental ... in which case
ignore the above.

Cheers,
Daniel.


.

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