Hard Drive - SATA vs IDE

Hello.

A couple of weeks ago I managed to get sparks coming out of my hard drive, and I thought I'd got away with it.

Well, I didn't. My PC has been temperamental ever since. It took four attempts to boot up this morning, three system hangs during boot and one total failure to detect that the hard drive was even there. Then it crashed about 10 minutes later. Ran Checkdisk and it found bad sectors all over the place. I'm looking for another 80GB drive, 160GB at a stretch. Cost-wise, up to about £30ish.

Its a 80GB IDE one. I don't mind sticking with IDE but I wouldn't mind getting a SATA one. The problem is my motherboard doesn't support SATA-II as its a few years old. I can't afford to spend a lot on this sp upgrading the motherboard right now is not an option.

Given that my next PC upgrade will likely be a major one (board, RAM, cpu), am I better off:

A) Sticking with IDE, then buy a new drive when I build a new PC
B) Getting a SATA hard drive that can be reused in a new PC.

Will a SATA-II drive work on a board that was only designed to support SATA? Done some googling and indications are that it should, but not all drives are backward compatible so this might be a gamble?

SATA2 drives work in SATA ports.

You're probably better off sticking with IDE, if you can find an IDE drive cheap enough. I haven't managed to detect any real speed difference between the two interfaces.

SATA is more energy efficient and is generally a more accomplished and better standard that PATA/IDE, but you just need a drive - it doesn't matter what it is so long as it works.

Of course it matters what it is. For instance, I wouldn't touch a Hitachi/IBM one with a very long stick. Sure it works NOW, but will it in six months time?

I've always had Maxtor and Western Digital drives in the past and had no problems whatsoever, until now, and even that was self-inflicted. I'm seeing a lot of Samsung Spinpoint drives about - they any good?

I can't stress enough that money is an issue and I can't really afford to pay out for a new drive, but its a case of having to and I want one that's reliable, and doesn't get so hot that you can fry eggs on top of it. I don't want to be replacing it again in a few months time.

Maxtor are bad now. WD I think are still good. Go for a Spinpoint if you can. I have several and they are excellent. Of course, go for SATA as IDE are obsolete.

My Samsung Spinpoint drives have been very reliable and quiet, but then my experience is that Maxtor drives fail within a year or two while IBM/Hitachi are very reliable, the exact opposite of what you've found.

I also haven't detected any practical difference between IDE and SATA, speed-wise.

WD, Samsung and Seagate are nice. Hitachi depends a little on which you get. The 2,5" seem to be worse than the desktop actually which helps a lot to kill their reputation.

And I had the same problems with Maxtor. 2 weeks past its 1 year warranty it died. nearly 200GB data lost.


I've 4x Samsung HD501IJ 500GB SATAII as Raid-5 in here, no problem at all and the first 2 of those 4 have been in use for 14 month at 12-24 hours a day as raid-0 + raid-1 intel matrix raid back then.

Regarding Hitachi - its not what I've found, its what I've heard.

In all fairness, when my laptop hard drive died last year, I was surprised when I removed it to see that it was a Hitachi one, and it'd given me six years of trouble free service.

PC World are stealth-shifting Hitatchi drives - they are selling a lot of HDs by repacking them in plain brown boxes with yellow labels on them that tell you the specs of the drive, but not the manufacturer. There must be a reason why they are shifting HD's in this manner.

Well, PC World stealth-shift everything. Every time I go in PC World they've got one price on the shelf, and another by the time you get to the checkout.

Went in for a PS2 Dual Shock controller a few weeks ago. Official Sony one, £9.99 shelf price - great! Get to the checkout and its doubled to £19.99. As with the Microsoft mouse that quadrupled in price to nearly £40, I told them to shove it.

No, I don't think I'll be doing any shopping at PC World any more.

[edit] Just ordered a 250GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA drive, 8MB Cache, £30. Picking it up Wednesday. :)

I've had two Samsung Spinpoint SATA drives fail on me in less than a year. Not unrecoverable, but bad enough for me to discontinue using them. Still, Samsung drives do have a good reputation - for reliability, and low noise emissions particularly - and it hasn't put me off buying them again.

I don't trust SATA connectors. They're flimsy and I'm sure they're responsible for the death of many recently produced HDDs.

Can I ask where you ordered that drive from? That's a pretty good price, and I'm in need of a new backup drive.

My last 5 HD's have been spinpoints -- so far none of them have died.

Very quiet, decent transfer speeds, and low temperatures.

Since I do hardware testing for a computer magazine I have seen and tested almost every drive available for general (and not so general) public. Base line? It's all the same stuff and it is basically pure chance if you'll get the drive that's bad. Does not depend on the manufacturer at all. Why is it so random? Simple? The drives are so cheap to produce that it's much cheaper for the manufacturers not to have full final quality control they used to have years ago. It is cheaper just to exchange the faulty unit without any questions asked. After all, they are not responsible for the data. Users are.

Regarding the differences between SATA and IDE drives. Basically there is not any. The drives are in most cases exactly the same, and the only difference is in the interface board. In normal single user environment it is very hard to find any difference in speed. It does show, but only when one moves to multi-user, server environment where a good SATA-II NCQ drive is superior to any IDE solution.

Barney

Only thing I can think of thats negative against ATA is that newer good mobos are mostly SATA for HD but do have one ATA channel for DVD drives. It's not good to share your HD with a DVD so your probably better off with SATA in the long run if your going to do a significant upgrade you want to last.

HD are so cheap now it isn't funny. $90 for 500mb $180 for 1TB hard drives. If I didn't need a DVD to install a couple of programs, I'd Just get a couple of big HD's.

You won't gain any performance between SATA and IDE, but you can buy drives that support both SATA and IDE ;)

If there are sata ports, would raid not be a possible option?
Then you would see some performance gains.

You can get decently sized IDE drives with super fast speed for boot drives.

@Gfk
You can get SATA to PATA converter. These are harder to find than a PATA to SATA converter. There are a couple of places in the US that sell these, maplin may sell them but information on their web site is lacking.
Though I did find this on ebay http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/PATA-to-SATA-Converter-Adapter---Serial-ATA-to-IDE---UK_W0QQitemZ180246368601QQcmdZViewItem?IMSfp=TL080525101a28624

I'm getting it from http://www.cclonline.com - its just down the road from me (well, not walking distance but not that far that I'd use mail order)

I'm not bothered if its no faster than IDE. I'm just futureproofing, is all.

according to toms hardware SATA have recently become a bit faster at reading than old PATA drives. Most Patas were in the 45 - 60 mb/s whilst the new SATA's start in the 60's and the new seagate barracudas read at 83mb/s

It's true, but generally speaking, the PATA interface is not yet a huge limits in the bandwidth. If you're planning on setting up a cheap RAID configuration, then SATA is pretty good. My two WD drives support both PATA and SATA, so I don't see much of a challenge there. Some drive do have SATA "ONLY" connectors for both power and I/O. In such a case your rig won't connect to this.

SATA drives normally are very much faster than thier IDE equvalents, but as it has been said they need SATA ports, cables, and special power connectors. Also I would check to make sure the motherboard supports it.

If you buy the same hard drive in either SATA or in IDE, both drives will be the exact same speed and use the same type of buffer. Only the interface is different. SATA offers more headroom for burst transfers, but the underlying limits are the same mechanically with the drives.

Regards

As I said, I'm not getting it with the expectation of a speed increase. I'm primarily getting it because my current drive is knackered. I've chosen SATA so I don't have to buy another drive when/if I get a new motherboard.

Jesus H Corbett... uh... I mean Christ.

Got my SATA drive today. Plugged it in, POST screen froze. After much plugging/unplugging it transpired that this drive doesn't auto-negotiate 1.5Gbps which is all my motherboard supports.

I downloaded a tool from the Samsung site to switch it to 1.5Gbps, only I couldn't boot to anything with the drive plugged in. Eventually I managed to fox it. Booted from the CD with no hard drive plugged in, then plugged the data cable in after the CD had booted. Job done.

Or so I thought....

It was detecting the hard drive fine now. So I plugged the molex connector into the side fan and put the side of the case back on, and switched it on.

No hard drives detected. EH?!

After much head-scratching I noticed through the perspex panel in the side of the case, that the SATA cable had come off the motherboard! Opened it up again and replaced it, all done. Its currently installing Vista SP1 as I speak.

But seriously tho.... how cruddy are SATA cables? It must've literally dropped off the motherboard when I plugged the case fan in as there's a fair old tangle of cables in there which I just can't be arsed to sort out tonight.

Every time I do anything inside me PC now, I'm going to have to check that the SATA cable hasn't gone walkabout before I replace the side panel.

just don't drop a powerful magnet on it....

The SATA cables I got with my Intel MB are the opposite... You can't get them on or off with out fear of breaking the MB.

I had to buy a SATA cable to go with the drive. I guess I'd rather have a loose-fitting cable than one I have to wrestle with.

SATA connectors are the Devil's work!