SATA vs IDE

S

slaya

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 10, 2002
Messages
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Do SATA drives still outperform IDE drives if they have the same specifictaions? basicly if 2 hard drives have the same cache, same seek time, and same RPM's will the sata drive outperform the IDE because of some upgrade from IDE to SATA?

I am debating weather to get a ...
WS 80gb 7200RPMs with 8.5ms seek time
or
Seagate 80gb 7200RPMs with 8.9ms seek time *SATA*
 
If you have two identical hard drives, and equip one with a Serial ATA controller, and the other with an ATA controller, there will be an extremely marginal performance difference. Depending on the benchmark, one interface may lead over the other. Now if you want to compare different drives with different internal performance features, it's hard to make a Serial ATA vs. ATA comparison, because there are other factors because the host bus interface.

In the case of the two drives you mentioned, the Western Digital drive will probably have a marginal performance advantage over the Seagate, due in part to the lower (advertised) seek time, and due to other internal performance factors like firmware, caching schemes, I/O controller chips, etc. You can see for yourself by visiting the Storage Review database and comparing the two drives directly:

http://storagereview.com/comparison.html
 
SATA really only holds an advantage over IDE in burst transfer speed.

It really just depends on which high performance tasks you plan to perform with your drive(s)...
 
Only in RAID 0 configurations involving several high performance drives does Serial ATA hold a burst read transfer speed advantage, but nonetheless you raise a valid point.
 
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