SATA or Serial ATA uses a serial cable for connection. The only differences I've heard of are that SATA is a bit faster than IDE. I also think I read somewhere that they're hot swappable, but I doubt anyone will give a crap about that. They're only just a bit faster as IDE goes up to ATA 133 now and SATA is 150. Not exactly a huge performance increase. I have 2 60GB Maxtor SATA HDDs in RAID 0. Pretty damn fast. Fastest file system I've ever had, but it's the striped array that makes the speed. Also, SATA hard drives use a different power connector than IDE. Some SATA drives (like mine), still have the old 4pin molex connector though. Just be careful if you ever buy one. And only a limited number of PSUs carry the SATA power connector. Although, that number may have increased a lot since they've been out for a good while now.
sata also offers increased air flow (smaller cables). Sata v2 is due soon or already here and i think it has a big increase in bandwidth. sata can be set up with speed, error correction, or both in mind. with speed set up (raid 0) you get to drives joined and writen as one, little bit to each drive. with safety you have 2 drives, one primary and one with a mirror image, with both you need 4 drives i think. ****unless your using something along the lines of 2 raptors or other 10,000+ drives in your raid set up your never going to come close to using the available bandwidth (133mbs for ATA, 150mbs for sata) ****to use sata raid both hard drives are recommended to be same brand/size
I believe that the problem with using Sata and raid 0 is that if one hard drive goes down, then both go, as one needs the other to run.
that is correct, thats why the ideal setup in my opinion is raid 0+1 using two high speed smaller drives for operating system and programs (for max speed, if a drive goes down just replace and reinstall) and either a single large drive (say 200gb) for documents/personal files (movies,music,etc) or two sata drives in a raid 1 array so you have essential files backed up and non essential files running at high speed ***not all sata capable motherboards offer the best of bost worlds, some only have raid 0 OR raid 1
Yeah, I think SATA 2 is 300MB/s as SATA is 150MB/s I had a friend tell me that it's all for show as most hard drives, except the raptors, don't get much over 80MB/s anyway. But, who knows? I'm not that familiar with hard drive speeds.
to move sideways slightly, which is the better of the 2 Mobo's, the Abit NF7-S Rev 2 or the Asus A7N8X-E, and why? I need one soon. Is either mobo suited to a gforce MX400 graphics card? and is either compatable with P4
They're both awesome boards. They're probably about the same quality wise and performance wise I'd wager. I just bought mine because it was the most popular overclocking board for Socket As I'd found. The only one I thought of getting besides this was a DFI Infinity board because it gave it just a bit more voltage. The only problems I've run into with my NF7-S are: the northbridge fan sucks, it's had a few very tiny problems with my RAID config (fixed with a BIOS flash) and that's all I can think of. Neither of these boards are compatible with Pentium as they're socket a (made for athlon, athlon xp, durons). Both very good boards though. Either one will serve you quite well. I'm not sure about the Asus board, deadcat would have to give you all the options as far as bells and whistles.
The real benefit of SATA2 standard is that if finally brings down some features from scsi world, namely native command queueing, that is if hdd supports it. Not many sata drives does yet, but slowly coming up there. The nominal burst speed increase from 150 to 300 ain't helping anything, as per the the bus bandwith hasn't been hindering hdd performance for ages. It's still the hdd itself creating the bottleneck. For example, nforce4 (ultra and sli ones, not the stripped version) chipset has native support for sata2 interfaces.
A7N8X-E is ecellent board for socket A cpus excellent oc ability, heaps of connectors (8usb, 2firewire, 2 sata from memory, 10/100/1000 lan x2), well spaced out, supports 3gig ram only problem iv had with mine is the sata driver comes on cd but when you install windows you need a floppy for drivers (so put on disc using another computer) that and the fact i cant get over 2100mhz but i think i need to fiddle a bit more . And socket A is long in the tooth now, but cheap as chips The computer in my sig cost me around AUD$1500 and the only thing i want is a better gfx card, another stick ram, and more sata drives.
