ATA Hard Drives Compared @ The Tech Report

[syngod]

STORAGE SPEED is currently one of the most critical bottlenecks for system performance, especially when paired with today's high-end processors and high-bandwidth platforms. While mainstream users in particular seem more impressed with how much storage capacity today's high-end hard drives offer, these new drives also boast much improved performance, lower noise levels, and larger caches.

Right now, the ATA hard drive landscape looks pretty good, and it's about to get even better. Current ATA hard drives use the ATA/100 and ATA/133 specs, which are limited to transfer rates of 100 and 133MB/sec, respectively. These drives use bulky 80-pin ribbon cables that clutter case interiors and interfere with internal air flow, but help is on the way. The new Serial ATA standard promises transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec using thin, flexible cables might make some wonder how they got by with IDE ribbons at all.

Read the rest of the article at The Tech Report

 

[xen_chris]

i have one huge missunderstanding: how come an ide hdd, even with ata 133, will ever be able to transfer data on a 150MB/sec speed, when it can reach about 90MB/sec in burst mode, and not a steady transfer mode ?? it is just in illusion that serial ata will improve your life with the old hdd-s. of course, if you do have a serial ata hdd, will be able to think that you reach that speed. btw, how many serial ata hdd-s are there on the market ??

 

[Big B]

They won't be able to hit that maximum. It's a theoretical maximum, and won't be hit. If you run several drives in something like a RAID 5 array, then we'll talk. But a single drive, oh no. The only company that has any ATA drive faster than 7200RPM is Western Digital, and they can do this because they don't really have a SCSI line to endanger. Even then, you won't see them hitting 150MB/s since the current PATA and SATA controllers all use the PCI bus. You'd hit the peak of the PCI bus before you could hit the 150MB/s the SATA drives could hit.

Right now, SATA drives provide absolutely nothing in terms of speed over the PATA drives. Their only real advantage is a thin cable, which doesn't restrict airflow like PATA cables do.
You also need to remember that SATA150 is the first generation product and that future versions will improve on these.

Seagate has their SATA drives on the market.