Serial ATA Worth It?

[BeaverTooth]

Since right now any mobo that has SATA on it still has to go through the PCI bus (basically just a controller card onboard) is it worth it to even put a SATA HD in your system, performance wise, or should you just stick with ATA HD's until a chipset comes out next year with SATA intergrated right into it. For instance Nvidia has been fairly good at working
on their drivers for their nForce2 chipset just as Intel has been for their own chipsets. Might you be better off using those native chipset features over the onboard Serial ATA interface? You can get the WD 80GB HD with 8MB cache and ATA 100, and there are 2 Serial HD's coming out from Maxtor and Seagate that also feature a 8MB cache. Which do you think is better or more worth while?

 

[ArborBarber]

Check out the new E7205 chipset offering ...I'm going with the seagate serial hd barracuda and a GA-8INXP mobo. You can always plug this bad boy into a future mobo...From what I understand though, is that, 50Mb/s is all your hd is going to see at present anyhow.

 

[AnimEva]

i would like to use it just because IDE cables suck so much

 

[mrman3k]

Theoretically SATA drives can transfer or burst up to 150MB/sec. In reality they will probably burst around 100MB/sec and average transfer rates will be around 70-80MB/sec which is a fairly optomistic estimate. The benefits however of onboard SATA controllers that still go through the PCI bus outweigh not having it built onto the mobo. First you will have the ultra thin SATA cables, I didn't realize how thin they were until I saw them in real life at Fry's. Also you can have longer cables and won't have to worry about master/slave conflicts.

 

[Hamburgerpimp]

and average transfer rates will be around 70-80MB/sec which is a fairly optomistic

They won't reach that. All IDE drives to date don't reach that. And most SCSI drives don't either. Run ATTO benchmark and you'll see.

Get ATTO here

 

[Lizardman]

Dont even worry about something if you dont need it. I mean just buy a SATA HD when thats alll your mobo supports. THis will probably be like 1 or 2 years in the future btw.