ChrisAdan650

Can anyone let me know if it is worth the upgrade? I'm building a new computer and I can either upgrade to a s-ata based hard drive along with the Athlon 64 3200+ 90nm cpu or I could keep my existing Western Digital 7200rpm/8mb cache 80 gig hard drive and go with the 3500+ 90nm cpu. What do you guys think?

starfury6

There's no doubt about the speed of SATA drives, but if youre happy with IDE performance at the moment, if I were you I'd be going for the faster Processor.

ChrisAdan650

Thanks for the reply starfury6. I would only purchase the s-ata hard drive over the 3500+ 90 nm AMD 64 bit cpu ONLY if it is a pretty big upgrade from a WD 7200rpm/8meg cache ide hard drive. I'm not talking about actual benchmarks. I want opinions from folks that that use both ide hard drives and s-ata hard drives. Thanks in advance.

The_Neon_Cowboy

be advised though serial ata us a huge leap in hdd performance rates of 150/mbps (sata2 has 300/mbps ) compaired to 33/66/100/133 of ata

also serial ata controlers take up alot less cpu useage then ata, hince the large differance people notice when people switching over


buy a sata drive
sell the ata drive

and you should be about even

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Vampyromaniac

The interface makes almost no difference when it comes to real-world usage speed. The more important factor is the actual mechanisms inside the drive, spindle speed, platter density, number of platters. The interface only describes the highest theoretical transfer speed of the drive. Sure, SATA allows for 150 MB/s compared to 100 MB/s of your IDE drive, but that is only the burst speed when transferring from the drive's cache, not reading/writing from the drive itself.

In other words, a SATA 74GB Western Digital Raptor drive would indeed be faster than your current drive, but not because it is SATA. It's because it has newer generation platters and 10,000 rpm spindle speed.

But a SATA 80GB Western Digital WD800JD (the only difference from your drive being the SATA interface) would offer no noticeable performance gain.


Concerning the CPU, if you are planning to overclock it, get the 3200+ . . . if you are not going to overclock (and want to spend the money,) get the 3500+.

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Danhill

Amen to that Vampy.

Newbi...pffftttt

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The_Neon_Cowboy

really take a look heres my point this is from overclockers uk link. This is the hard drive utillization useing an ATA drive for hpt372, for sata thier useing the same drive but with a sata adapter.



there for it's easy to see even with out incresed tranfer speeds cpu useage is way down meaning more cpu free for those games and bechmarks insted of slaveing for the HDD transfers....

(a SATA adapter for the drive thier like $9-$30)


to me 30+% less peak hdd cpu useage would be a considerable gain!

(this could be wrong but hey since i've havn't swicthed over yet i have to rely on what I read )

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Vampyromaniac

First of all, CPU utilisation does not depend on interface, it depends on the hard drive controller and its drivers. Your link just shows that the HPT372 has high CPU utilisation, not all IDE controllers are like that.
My own IDE controllers are thus: VIA controller uses 4%, Promise controller uses 8%.
My previous IDE controller, from SiS, used 2%.

Second of all, while playing games, your hard drive is not being used much if at all. The only time a game really uses the hard drive is during loading, not during playing.

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Zardon

ive seen no difference between IDE and SATA with the same drives. as vamp said its down to the controllers etc.

SATA cables are better for airflow, downsides are I think the connectors are flimsy.

swimtech

All together, the difference in upgrading your processor will be much greater than upgrading the hard drive and the interface - the WD drive you have now is still a good, fast drive.

Check out www.storagereview.com for speed rankings of current and past drives...

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ChrisAdan650

Well thing is, if I do end up buying a S-ATA based hard drive, it would run at 7200rpm with an 8meg cache. It has an 8.9ms seek time which is exactly the same as my WD IDE based 7200rpm/8mb cache with an 8.9ms seek time also. Would I only notice a difference when loading huge files? Is it worth shelling out another 80 bucks for a S-ATA drive rather than keeping my current IDE drive? What's the difference anyways? 5 seconds maybe? lol, I'm just rambling now. Thanks for the replies.

pr0digal jenius

unless you are gettign a new motherboard, stick with IDE for now..if you're gettign a new mobo, get oen that has SATA compatibility, as IDE is goign out fo style, but I'd keep the IDE hard drive for now

MiDKnYtE

you will not see a performance difference between the drives. The interface is not the bottleneck here. Cache, RPM, platter density, etc. affect the drive a lot more.

Judas

whoa.... those are quite the interesting beserkly stupid numbers there..

HDTach had for me, a well known problem with ALL my highpoint controllers... (onboard).... .reguardless of what i was doing, it just constantly reported extremely high CPU usuage.... yet, if i was moving massive files around or small ones.... play music.... encode video.... what ever you like to do.... using task manager with HIGH speed anylysing... it'd only spit out at best 15% (worst of times).. but that more likely related to other things going on....

The newest version of HDTach is the first to actually get ahold of decent figured, scoring faster bandwidth results and anywere from 4-5% cpu usage.... and this covers everything from the hpt360 to the hpt374 that i currently am using for my dedicated server (which ATM, is my main computer).... it encodes completely uncompressed audio/video AVI files beuatifully.....

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Vampyromaniac

Like I said before: You would notice no difference.

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bug77

Considering that PATA gives you at least 100MB/s transfer and that no HDD can sustain that rate, upgrading to SATA will yield no performance increases. Actually, Intel decided not to support PATA133 since there were no real gains in apps over PATA100 (and that's a 33% increase in max theorethical transfer rate). Since the difference between PATA133 and SATA150 is only 11.33%, you can't expect much from that either. Also, you can always upgrade later.

However, SATA HDDs can work independently, while PATA can only be active one at a time for each cable they are connected to. But you seem to have only one HDD, so this will not benefit you either.

CDsDontBurn

only go SATA if you get a WD Raptor, or that new Maxtor 300Gb drive w/16Mb cache. Then that way you can get the 3500+ and a better gaming system.

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refraction

my gf's brother has had 6 SATA hard drives, up to now only 2 have survived, the rest have had some serious problems, prossibly cos the technology is still pretty new.

tbh im not a fan of the connectors, they seem a bit loose and fragile to me.

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starfury6

What manufacturer were all these SATA drives? All different?

My next box (if the SATA2 Drives aren't widely available) will have WD Raptor 74GB 10k rpm drives, 2 of them.

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swimtech

Sorry ChrisAdan650 - I had to go back and re-read your first post. Vampy had your answer earlier in his replies to you, and Zardon has spoken with authority and experience that he sees no difference in performance between PATA and SATA (he is running a very top end machine too - if anyone would notice a difference because of the interface alone, he would).

You're building a new computer now, and have a WD PATA 8Mb cache, 7200 rpm drive. You want to know if you should keep the drive and get an AMD 3500, or get an AMD 3200 and upgrade to SATA now (to keep your expense on the new computer equal), and what is the difference, right?

Bottom line is - the 3500 processor with your existing WD PATA drive will be the faster system. Keep your existing drive and use it. You won't notice a difference in drive performance, and bug77's post tells you why...

Since you are building a new system with a new mainboard though, likely the mainboard your getting has both hard drive interfaces. You can always add SATA drives later as you get the money, as pr0digal jenius implies...

Basically, all here are saying not to bother with SATA drives for your system now, it ain't worth it for you. Hope this answers your question...

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No_Style

If this is a full upgrade then go S-ATA. Sexy cables. Performance wise, same as IDE or just synthetically better (For now). My next system will be with S-ATA drives only. Seeing how there are S-ATA optical drives as well. It's also good to know that the price difference between S-ATA and IDE has been reduced significantly over the year.

But if this isn't a full upgrade, which I believe you mentioned, nothing wrong with IDE.

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ChrisAdan650

Thanks for the extra info Swimtech and No Style. It's grealy appreciated. I decided to take the advice and not upgrade to sata at this moment. Thanks again.