Have two HDD's in my machine. Since my motherboard doesn't support RAID I am left with using software to sync folders between the drives as a backup. Currently almost all my applications and games are on the first drive alongside the OS. Using SATA drives will I get better performance keeping the OS and applications on separate drives, or will the higher bandwidth of SATA more than easily keep up with the storage access needs?
Depends on what the drives are. The interface doesn't really matter for performance, just what make and model the drives are. e.g. a Newer revision S-ATA drive will be faster than an older IDE one, but only because it's newer, not because it's S-ATA, if that makes any sense.
They are the same drive. I know that with old IDE drives you would suffer if you had both drives daisy chained and the computer was trying to read/write from both at the same time over the same cable. With SATA connections having their own dedicated bandwidth I wasn't sure if there would be a performance advantage if I kept the OS separate so the CPU wouldn't be trying to read/write for both the OS and the Apps over the same cable on the same HDD at the same time.
If you regularly read/write off two drives at once, then connecting them with the same IDE cable would cause degraded performance.
Ok. So SATA 3Gb/s is more than enough overhead and running OS and apps separately is only useful with a small capacity, high speed OS drive/large slower storage drive. For the price of buying a RAID card I'd be better off buying a new motherboard entirely which isn't an option for me at the moment.
