Question about PATA on new MOBO

[ju5tin99]

My old processor or motherboard died (I can't figure out which), and I'm going to upgrade both. I've been looking at all the AM2 boards on Newegg, and they pretty much all have just one PATA connector these days (it's been a few years since I've looked into upgrading). I'm running two hard drives connected by IDE cable, and my DVD burner is also connected by IDE cable. Currently the drives are running to one PATA slot on the motherboard, and the burner is connected to a different one. All the new motherboards say that the PATA supports up to two devices.

Does this mean that I won't be able to connect both the hard drives and the burner at the same time, or is the connection for the DVD burner referred to by another name? Will I have to get a SATA hard drive for this to work?

 

[mxthunder]

A cheaper alternative to getting a SATA hdd is just to get a SATA dvd drive, for about 20 bucks as opposed to a $60-70 HDD.

You are correct though, with only 1 pata interface, you will only be able to run 2 devices

 

[ju5tin99]

A cheaper alternative to getting a SATA hdd is just to get a SATA dvd drive, for about 20 bucks as opposed to a $60-70 HDD.

You are correct though, with only 1 pata interface, you will only be able to run 2 devices

I'm guessing this means that SATA is now pretty much the standard and is reliable with optical drives? When I built my current rig about 4 years ago, Plextor had pretty much the only SATA optical drive available, at least as far as I could find. I got one and spent about a week trying everything I could to make it work, and I could just never get the thing to work correctly. I ended up returning it and going with a Sony IDE drive that has worked great for me. Have SATA optical drives come a long way since then?

 

[repo man11]

My LG SATA DVD drive has been completely trouble free. But I think you're missing the performance boost that could come with an SATA hard drive. Though I haven't been looking for the highest performance IDE drive in quite a while, I'm not aware of any that have sixteen megabytes of cache, much less the thirty two megs you can get with a WD black drive.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

I'm not aware of any that have sixteen megabytes of cache, much less the thirty two megs you can get with a WD black drive.

Cache size doesn't matter, but the platter density and other factors do. A $70 WD 640GB will have similar access times to any other 7200RPM drive, including IDE ones, but the transfer rates will be 1.5-2X as fast as the average older IDE drive. Plus the SATA cables are easier to deal with.

 

[repo man11]

Cache size doesn't matter, but the platter density and other factors do. A $70 WD 640GB will have similar access times to any other 7200RPM drive, including IDE ones, but the transfer rates will be 1.5-2X as fast as the average older IDE drive. Plus the SATA cables are easier to deal with.

You may be right about that.

According to Western Digital, the Black's platters are simply an evolved version of what's available in the 640GB Caviar SE16. Upgrades have been applied elsewhere on the drive, too, including a bump in onboard cache to 32MB. Western Digital has long maintained that its performance profiling shows little benefit to jumping from 16 to 32MB of cache—a belief so strong that even the new VelociRaptor has a 16MB cache. However, with terabyte drives from Hitachi, Samsung, and Seagate all featuring 32MB caches, I suspect the Caviar Black's cache size was increased just to keep up with the Joneses. At the very least, workloads that would easily saturate a 16MB cache won't be a problem for the Black, however rare and unusual those workloads might be.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15363

But the point remains the same regardless; buying a high performance IDE drive these days is similar to trying to buy a high performance AGP card. And every drive I've ever bought, even when it was basically the same model from the same company a few months to a year later, has been noticeably faster than the drive it replaced.

 

[Bobnova]

There are a bunch of am2+ mobos in the $60 range with 2xPATA on newegg. There's an AM3 too.

 

[xrror]

I think the biggest performance concern with PATA these days is if the PATA channel/controller is native to the chipset or not.

I know quite a few Intel chipsets don't support PATA natively anymore, so it's implemented through a JMicron controller or something, in which case you'll take more of a performance hit than you expect.

But if the AM2/3 chipset you're looking at has native PATA then probably no rush to jump to SATA. There are also PATA to SATA adapters if you really want to keep your old drives, and they work pretty well. But those are also around $15 a piece.

Just throwing out some more options for you.

 

[ju5tin99]

There are a bunch of am2+ mobos in the $60 range with 2xPATA on newegg. There's an AM3 too.

I checked those out. Some of them were Micro ATX and that's a deal breaker for me, I definitely want ATX. Some of them looked like the second PATA slot was smaller, like you would attach a floppy drive and not an optical drive to it. I just really didn't find anything that I wanted.

I hadn't thought of the SATA DVD burner though, I can afford that and probably recover half the money from selling the old one anyway. Thanks for the help guys.