Good SATA Controller?

JengoJengo Pasco, WA | USA
edited November 2005 in Hardware
Well, i really want the Speed of Serial ATA, would getting a controller (this comp doesnt have any SATA ports) be worth it? or should i just stick with IDE?

I heard that Serial ATA PCI cards arent as fast as SATA built into the chipset. Is this so? and how much of a difference is there?

The main question here... is a Serial ATA card worth it?

Comments

  • zero-counterzero-counter Linux Lubber San Antonio Member
    edited November 2005
    Jengo wrote:
    The main question here... is a Serial ATA card worth it?
    The one i'm selling is.... :D

    If you have the option, move up to SATA. As far as cards being slower than chipsets, theoretically the answer is yes. But real world tests don't reveal a day/night difference.
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited November 2005
    If you are looking at serial ATA for a magic performance boost, you will be dissapointed. They aren't that noticiably faster against standard IDE.

    It's a bit like the old ATA-133 thing that Maxtor touted around for a while. Benchmarked higher but in real world daily usage, there just wasn't any noticable difference. Using a SATA card will indeed blow off any additional potential performance anyway as it routes through the PCI bus ;)

    SATA is best because of the smaller, thin cables more than a performance thing at the moment ;)
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited November 2005
    SATA is really no faster as a interface for a single drive that you will ever feel. The raptors are the only sata drive I know thats faster then their pata counterpart.

    95 percent of the sata drives today are pata drives with modified interfaces. There is no real world differance in pata versus sata except for raptors that are 10k drives. Toidays drives transfer at half or less the sspecs of the old original sata spec. the only real world advantage is if you have a big window in the side of your case and want smaller cables to look cool UNLESS you have more then two drives in a raid array.

    Some of the onboard chipsets get around the limitations of the pci bus when raiding more then a couple sata drives but are no faster on single drives.

    As shorty said more eloquently... your wasting your money on sata. If you want faster... get a new cpu/mb. If you have a fast modern ide drive the only sata drive you might "feel" a differance in using is a raptor.

    if you really want to "feel" a differance.... get a 21320 scsi controller and a pair of maxtor 15k scsi drives. Thats maybe $150 bucks for two drives and controller on ebay if your patient and that rig smokes raptors.

    Tex
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