How much of a speed difference is there between SATA and ATA? Can I use both SATA and ATA hard drive in a PC with raid? I am looking to build a new machine and I found 2 Maxtor 200G 8MB cache ATA drives for $80 a piece. I my new PC will have a raid board so that I can run 4 hard drives on it. Should I keep the Maxtor drives or would I be better off with SATA drives? I havn't bought the CPU or motherboard yet. I thought that this was a good deal on the drives.
You may be posting this on the wrong board, but I will give my opinion: PATA (ATA) & SATA drives are about equal now in performance (not noticable). As far as I know SATA has 150mb/s bandwith and ATA has 133mb/s. SATA is more convenient and has a more reliable connection. Also SATA drives generally consume less power. I think the deal on the Maxtor Drives are very good. However 400 gigs may be a little too much unless if you want to archive movies or DVD audio on your PC. Also, if you are an animator, the extra drive space is good. I would suggest that you get a motherboard that has both SATA & ATA connections so that you can upgrade to SATA later on if necessary. SATA will get faster and faster as time goes by, but that may take a year or more. So my opinion is, to get normal ATA if there is a significant price difference, but SATA is now slightly better and a liitle more convenient to install (better airflow). If they are similar in price, I would recommend the SATA drives, but make sure your power supply and motherboard support it. Also, you should look at the prices for Western Digital 160 gig HDs. I have seen upto $70 rebates on these drives making it about $50 which is actually less than the maxtor drives.
