Sata

Just found out my new motherboard has this. These are the type of HDs that have 150mb/sec transfer rates correct?
Where can I get a hard drive like this? Are they expensive? I checked tiredirect but didnt see any listed?

Serial ATA does indeed have a maxium effective speed of 150MByte/sec. The thing is that most drives don't seek fast enough to use that huge rate, save the obscenely expensive and low-capacity 10K RPM drives.

As the proud owner of an Asus A7N8X Deluxe, I do not plan on using my Silicon Image SATALink controller for its RAID function. Until drives catch up I'd advise you to use IDE; the drives for the most part cannot keep up.

I did a case study on setting up a 2x120-gig SATA RAID setup in my current box and it wasn't promising. For what I would pay overall I could have three or four IDE drives (120 gigs) in an array.

mmm well the prices of SATA drives are going down pretty good. IMO it looks like if you shop around you'll find a sata drive for about 10-20 dollars more than the IDE sister of the same drive.

Prices really aren't all that much more expensive than the PATA drives.

OR you can always go wit ha PATA--SATA adapter to make any ide drives hook into the sata module. for one the cables will be a LOT smaller and easier.

Captain-Newbie: I would look much further into this matter if I were you. I have a Hitachi Deskstar 180GXP 7200rpm 8MB cache P-ATA HDD, that's connected to S-ATA using an Asus SATA dongle (P-ATA to S-ATA) it gave the drive an 11MB/sec higher transfer rate when compared to it being connected to IDE as master on it's own flatcable. If you have S-ATA onboard and you're about to buy a new HDD anyways I would use it anytime...

I got my Baracudas at the Egg very pleased with them so far, there nice and quiet also. http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProdu...-148-019&catalog=14&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=1

You can find the latest SATA drives at newegg.com. Usually SATA is a few dollars more than its PATA counterpart.

If you don't need a new harddrive, i wouldn't buy a SATA drive just to use those ports, but if you need harddrives anyway..then definitely go with the SATA. For the $10, its worth it for the neater pc interior and better air flow.