another newbie ?which is best,ide or sata

[Grampa]

this has probably been asked by alot of noobs,If I had more time I would do the book work and learn the differences for myself,but the easy way is to ask those who know,I have an NF7-S ver2so it supports sata drives

[{PMS}fishy]

Please define best.

If by best you mean fastest than SATA.

If by best you mean large storage/price than ATA.

It all depends on what you will be doing, and what you are looking for.

[Grampa]

well since I am building this system for gaming and folding then I think that speed is what I need.,.,Thanks fishy....p.s. yous system looks alot like the one I am building..NF7-S rev 2.0/AQXEA 0331 SPMW

[blackjackel]

Well it would all depend on what you currently have right now.

Wouldnt make sense if you have a slow RPM harddrive to run SATA.

Matter of fact (and i am not sure about this) i dont think there are any harddrives out there that can take full SATA advantage.


So as of right now, it really dosent matter if you use SATA or ATA.

Although i will say one thing, the tiny connectors on the sata do help with airflow, so if it does anythign now, it does that ;)

[Grampa]

Alos,where kind I find a good source for learning about the different subsystems (hard drives, chipsets,bios,etc.etc)I like to take every thing apart and find out how it works ,but only if I cant get that info another way

[Grampa]

I have not bought my hard drive yet,thats why I am asking about the different options/types.kinda learning as I go,I have threads all over oc forums.maybe someday I will be the one helping the newbie

[blackjackel]

remember, we were ALL newbies once...


And if you are presistent (damn i am sleepy) enough, you WILL be answering questions on this forum in the future!


Learn on my young padowan!

[apenland01]

Originally posted by blackjackel
remember, we were ALL newbies once...

And for this very reason you should spend time reading some reviews of HD's for yourself and draw your own conclusions. I chose SATA because my board supported it, it is slightly quicker based on reviews I read and it cost about the same as IDE with smaller cords.

Good Luck

[Rich25]

i'd go SATA for only the reason that the cable is so much nicer to route and hide. if you want speed, probably go with a raptor which are SATA. Unless there is a maor price difference and your board supports it i'd go SATA.

Rich

[I.M.O.G.]

A while back I read an opinion of Dan's from Dansdata on hard drive upgrades - he discussed hard drive performance and he put it something like this. Hard drive performance only accounts for 10% of system performance, so doubling your hard drive performance could only result in something like a maximum 10% improvement in usability. This assumes you have a system that is not choking because it doesn't have enough RAM and everything else in it is also up to snuff.

Now that might be his opinion somewhat from his experience, but he is somewhat experienced and a very good reviewer.

In my experience, the upgrade from a 5600 rpm HDD to a 7200 rpm HDD with 8MB cache was barely noticeable day to day, but convenient when I was installing a bulky program or transfering a bunch of files. When a generous member of the forum (word out to my brother Turd) sent me a free Fasttrak TX2 RAID controller and I installed it combining two 7200 rpm 8MB cache drives, the performance difference was VERY noticeable - for things I do day to day everything opens immediately.

In comparison to my experience, I would not expect the upgrade to SATA to be earth shaking. If I were going to upgrade from where I'm at now I'd have to go with raptor grade speed in RAID-0.

[I.M.O.G.]

[Off Topic]

Originally posted by apenland01


And for this very reason you should spend time reading some reviews of HD's for yourself and draw your own conclusions. I chose SATA because my board supported it, it is slightly quicker based on reviews I read and it cost about the same as IDE with smaller cords.

Good Luck

I don't even have time to read many reviews for myself these days... I hardly have time to even get on the forums recently. I know how Joe feels, as I am in the same boat as he mentioned in his threadstarting post.

But the time I do spend here, I learn more in less time than I could by reading anywhere else. Getting to discuss things with people is a much better way for me to remember things than reading some dry article.

Often times the people you discuss things with will reference you to articles that are worth your time to read though... And this really saves you time.

I haven't ever just surfed the net looking for random articles unless I want to find out something very specific on a topic I have an acute interest in. But still, I could probably name off about 30 article titles by memory and write an abstract about each - all thanks to the people who have helped me out here since I've joined.

To conclude, the most important thing is to ask good questions when you can so that people can most easily give you good accurate answers. It is not the newbie's job to educate him/herself here so that they can be part of the community, it's our job to get them up to speed as quickly as possible. We are all here to help.

You new guys, and anyone else who hasn't stopped in already, should click on my signature below this post and say hello!

Welcome to the forums! :)
[/Off Topic]

[OC Noob]

The drive I'm getting fairly soon and would recommend to you is the 74 gb Western Digital Raptor. Its the fastest non-15k scsi drive out there for single users. Its VERY quite for the speed and runs at decent temps.

Its really the best drive out their right now unless you go 15k scsi and it can even keep up with most of those for much cheaper.

The big drawlback right now is that its $250 for a 74 gb HD.

I agree that it is used less then other components, but that 10% of the time seems SOOOOOO slow. If you can aford $250 for a drive that cuts that time in half then I say go for it!


Also, if you are working with very large files raid is good, but if you only work it small or average sized files its not worth it as only tranfer speed is increased, not acess speed. So if you are working with small/average files the seek times will kill any boost raid gives (i.e. games) vs sustained transfers that raid is good for.

Heck if you have $500 then go for the best of both world and get two Raptors for Raid 0!!! Just kidding, you probably don't want to raid drives with the NF7-S as they seem to have corruption problems hard drives in Raid 0. One 74 gb raptor will be as fast as two raided for most commonly used apps anyway. Unless you commonly edit big files and junk like that.


ps some people will say Windows boots super fast with raid 0 so its performance must be much better, but 2000 & XP booting are like absolute ideal conditions for raid 0 setups. i.e. the order of files acessed is VERY structured and predictable vs. the randomness of using programs in windows. I can't remeber the specifics of why this is, but if you'd like I can dig up a link to the article. Simply put, booting into windows is a very, very poor gauge of how a Raid 0 setup is performing while using software.

[apenland01]

Originally posted by IMOG
[Off Topic]

Often times the people you discuss things with will reference you to articles that are worth your time to read though... And this really saves you time.



This is the key point, Nugent. READ, READ, READ, but do so in an efficient manner such as by article reference by forum members. To take anything someone says in a forum (even this one) at face value without supporting evidence is risky at best and foolish at worst, unless someone is established as an "expert" in that category. The moderators do the best they can do, but they are still human and can't keep up with everything, like bad advice.

In the end Nugent, it's your money and time. TIME=MONEY and MONEY=TIME. It's your call as to which is more important to you and what you want to accomplish.

I am still a noob, but have spent the last year reading this forum and researching equipment. It wasn't until last month that I actually started buying gear based on what I read on this forum and researched for myself based on recommended articles. I didn't want to be the guy saying, "why won't this work with that and why did I fry this or that".

Of course, if money isn't a concern to you then this post is worthless :D :D

[Grampa]

I am very gratefull to all those who have responded to this thread,as far as which to choose. As you see I have updated my sig,for the money I feel that this is a pretty good bargin,and later I can add another in raid 0(hey ocnoob,in reading up on the NS7-S they did have problems with raid 0 configs but I believe those troubles were cleared up on version 2) this will keep me learning for awhile.tonight is the first time I have reread this thread since the last time I added to it,so if all of you could please read the reply I added to the sticky in memory(basics,tweaking and overclocking)and also the thread I started in the memory forum,any help is appreciated