No, SATA drive is not necessarily faster than ATA (PATA)
drive. The physical design, ie. how fast is the platters
rotates, and how fast the servo motors move the read/write
across the platters, matters. So, with similar physical
design SATA vs PATA drive, they perform very much the same
in real system. Most hard disk vendors produce both SATA
and PATA drives basing on the same physical platforms, and
the performance difference is minimal.
What SATA drive will give you is:
1) Thinner data cable, so better air circulation within
chasis.
2) Potentially to have hot-plug capability, but whether
hot-plug is supported depends on a lot of things, like
chipset design, driver support and OS support, etc.
My 2 cents.
Stephen Wong @ Hong Kong
On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Peter B. wrote:
> I need to add a new hard drive to my ASUS p4p800 deluxe machine. It
> currently has an ATA 100 drive. In the real world, are the SATA drives
> that much faster than an ATA drive? I know that they are capable of
> operating a 150 MBps, but does that translate into a drive that is 50%
> faster than my current drive?
>
> Are there any other advantages or disadvantages to SATA drives?
>
> Pete
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>> Stay informed about: SATA vs ATA drive