Sata?

[blue_jeans_vb]

I don't know what sata is? Can any of you tell me what it is. I just browse about it. Is it a thinner cable compared to ide cable(tell me if I'm wrong I don't know if I would refer to it as ide cable or pata cable). Are they compatible to older harddisks? Many thanks.

 

[Bryce W]

SATA is the new type of drive interface. It is thinner than the old 40 pin IDE cables (The IDE interface is actually called PATA (Parallel ATA), not sure if the IDE cables are also called PATA Cables though).

SATA stands for Serial ATA and you cannot plug an old harddrive into a SATA interface unless you have a converter plug. You can however run a SATA harddrive on a SATA Plug, and a PATA Drive on a PATA plug, on the same machine with no problems. You can also purchase a PCI SATA controller if your motherboard doesnt support SATA.

The main difference between SATA and PATA is the size (as mentioned before) and the speed. The max PATA transfer speed was something like 130mbps. Early SATA can do 150mbps and SATA II can do 300mbps

 

[thecoldone06]

Don't quote me on this but I think SATA does RAID arrays as well. I've never seen PATA do RAID arrays but I have done them many times with SATA

 

[Blues]

There has also been uses of SAS Serial Attached SCSI which my understanding uses SATA cables and has higher preformance speed but requires a seperate controller. I would like to know how accurate that is or more details on SAS and SATA in terms of what each is capable of what thier flaws are and so on.

 

[Noodle2732]

the main diffrences are the speed, also you can put SATA drives into arrays and hence either provide failsafe security or double your HDD speed and size (just to examples of many array types)

RAID 1:
Mirror, Whatever goes on one drive goes on the other at the same time, therefore if one drive fails you havent lost anything you just unplug the faulty drive run up the second drive and theres every thing o/s data anything that was on the other drive.

RAID 0:
Stripe, Two drives that your o/s will only see as one the two drives are added together, whenever you save something to disc it gets split in two, half goes on one disc and the other half goes on the other disc, hence halfing the write/read time, also you get twice the storage space i.e. two 250Gb drives in RADI 0 = 500Gb drive thats twice as fast. downside is that if one drive fails you've lost everything on both drives.

In both cases the drives have to be idetical drives.

Also most mobo's/SATA controllers are hot swapable so you dont have to turn your machine of to change your hdd, good for backups.

I've also seen some companies trying to push e-SATA (external SATA) as a standard, providing faster data transfer.

 

[blue_jeans_vb]

Thank you all for responding. I can't talk about it because of my limited knowledege about computers. But I enjoy reading and learning.

 

[greggh]

Don't quote me on this but I think SATA does RAID arrays as well. I've never seen PATA do RAID arrays but I have done them many times with SATA

I hate to quote you on this... but PATA (IDE) has raid implementations out there too. I should know, I have a 16 drive raid setup using seagate ide drives. There are many controllers and systems built specifically for raid with PATA/IDE.

 

[gunslinger]

Pretty sure greggh is right on this. As for me I never really cared for RAID 0 much, the bit of extra speed gained is just not worth double the chance I'll lose my data. As for RAID 1, I think if you have anything over 100 gigs or so of data, and an extra drive, you would be a fool not to use it if you can.

 

[greggh]

I just built a new workstation for my main computer up at my office.

Intel Core2Dual E6320
FoxConn TS01 ATX case / 350w ps
Intel DG965RYCK a/v/gl/ATX motherboard
Intel E6320 1.8/1066 box cpu
Kingston 1g DDRII/667 x 4
Seagate 250gig SATAII x5
Sony DVD+-RW

The 5 hard drives are configured as 2 raids. 2 of the drives are setup as raid-1, that will be for the system install (Ubuntu, with XP Pro running in a seamless VMWare.) The other 3 drives will be in a raid-5 setup for all my data. This should help make sure I dont lose anything I am working on. I also have a 500gig external usb drive that acronis will be backing up to every night (both raids.)

Gotta love raid, and you have to love acronis.

 

[thecoldone06]

I hate to quote you on this... but PATA (IDE) has raid implementations out there too. I should know, I have a 16 drive raid setup using seagate ide drives. There are many controllers and systems built specifically for raid with PATA/IDE.

haha but I said don't quote me on this, just kidding. I had just never seen RAID done with IDE. You learn something new everyday!

 

[Fred_G]

There has also been uses of SAS Serial Attached SCSI which my understanding uses SATA cables and has higher preformance speed but requires a seperate controller. I would like to know how accurate that is or more details on SAS and SATA in terms of what each is capable of what thier flaws are and so on.

The SAS Drives need a controller card, or a motherboard with SAS ports. The Cable is different from SATA cables. The power and data are combined on one cable. SAS controllers will support a SATA drive. SAS cables are expensive, about $30 to $40 per drive for the ones I found.

Hopefully I will have my SAS drives up and running next week when my cables come in. Will post back with some benchmarks if it works.

E