ATA vs. SATA

Anyone using SATA HDDs?

Besides smaller cabling, any performance benefits of SATA HHDs over ATA HDDs?

Yes, speed.

I can’t remember the stats but when I rebuilt/upgraded my DAW I benchmarked my ATA133 drive with my new SATA drive. The new drive won hands down.

Oh, and you free up an IDE device too.


HTH


Mark

SATA w/ RAID-0 to boot!

Just check to make sure your sata controller isn’t taking over the pci buss. You might need to adjust (reduce) it’s PCI latency. This is something thats come up in the EMU forums.

Also some new motherboards are dumping support for 2 IDE interfaces in favour of just one IDE interface (2 devices) with extra SATA support instead, so going SATA could future-proof you to some extent, as well as giving you a faster data bus, better case airflow, etc.

Just be certain that the SATA controller is native of the south bridge like with the Intel 875p chipset and not via a Silicon Image chip integrated onto the mother board.
The integrated Silicon Image chips are on the PCI bus and can cause bandwidth issues with other PCI devices. Not good for that fancy PCI soundcard.
Not that there is anything wrong with the Silicon Image controller. It’s fine for normal computing and games but not so fine for DAW work.