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TheBlueRaja · 10-08-2005, 21:21

Actually forget it - i've done some reading and basically from what i can tell SATA is a gimmick with the advantage of having a thinner cable. SATA II has a "300 Mbps" transfer rate - which is whoopie, except that the most you can transfer from a disk is about 70 - 80 mbps in real world unless your reading from the buffer.

So therefore the disk with the biggest buffer is the best, give or take, as with IDE, SATA or SATAII as you'll never be able to achieve higher transfer rates than around 90mbps.

Other gimmicky stuff like NCQ (Native command queing) which is implemented on certain SATA drives are supposed to spead things up, but from what i can tell under real world conditions it dosent do much with some drives actually performing worse with NCQ on than off under real world.

So in effect - get SATA as its going to be on most Mobo's etc in the future, but dont expect much more from it than your normal IDE drive.

Unless somebody knows different and i have misread this stuff.

10-08-2005, 21:21	#2
TheBlueRaja cf.mega poster Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Baw deep in a munter Age: 50 Services: Initiations, rep rigging and orgies! Posts: 5,750	Re: SATA 2 PCI Controller Actually forget it - i've done some reading and basically from what i can tell SATA is a gimmick with the advantage of having a thinner cable. SATA II has a "300 Mbps" transfer rate - which is whoopie, except that the most you can transfer from a disk is about 70 - 80 mbps in real world unless your reading from the buffer. So therefore the disk with the biggest buffer is the best, give or take, as with IDE, SATA or SATAII as you'll never be able to achieve higher transfer rates than around 90mbps. Other gimmicky stuff like NCQ (Native command queing) which is implemented on certain SATA drives are supposed to spead things up, but from what i can tell under real world conditions it dosent do much with some drives actually performing worse with NCQ on than off under real world. So in effect - get SATA as its going to be on most Mobo's etc in the future, but dont expect much more from it than your normal IDE drive. Unless somebody knows different and i have misread this stuff.