PCI SATA versus IDE

P

peergynt_lwb

New Member
Hi,

I need to attach a new SATA hard drive to use as the boot device. The board has normal IDE (ATA133) connectors and a PCI 2.2 channel. No native SATA connectors. So, which solution would offer better performance...

1). a SATA adapter plugged into the PCI channel?

or

2). a SATA to IDE converter, which attaches the SATA HD to the IDE ribbon?


OK, here's some confusing stuff which most manufacturers and spec writers don't even seem to be clear about. Skip reading this if you, yourself, want to avoid becoming confused! I know that:

--A pure SATA1 connection can deliver 1.5 GB/s (I assume this is bits, not bytes).
--My PCI 2.2 is capable of 533 MB/s (I assume this is bytes, not bits).
--The IDE controller can do 133 MB/s (bytes?).
--Finally, the SATA adapter's specs read 150 MB/s (bits?).

AAARRRGG! Please, tell me what it all means!!!! But more importantly, which solution should I use?

Thanks for reading!
 
You woulda been better off buying an IDE drive in the first place. If possible, I would just take it back and get an IDE HD, but if you can't... I'm not sure if it matters, HDs aren't too fast and none of those would be a bottleneck under normal use (burst reads w/10kRPM drives? Maybe.). I personally would get a SATA controller card in case you need to get more storage later, and also keep your IDE slots free, you may need them. Also, I've heard that those SATA->IDE adapters don't always work too well (is this just a rumor or not, IDK).
 
What are you going to use it for? Seeing as you have a motherboard that only supports IDE, I doubt you'll be doing any gaming. Thus, my conjecture is, either option is fine :)
 
I had the same problem as you. My old board had AGP and just the old PCI slots.

I had a 500gig sata 3g drive. PCI sata cards were really expensive, unless I had PCI-E, which were only about $20 or around there, so I went with a adapter.

Sucked!

I couldnt use any media from the drive. Video and audio would skip horribly when listening to a song or video that was located on that drive. I ran a disk check and my ide drives were reading/writing around 30-50mbs. The sata drive with an adapter was running 2-3mbs read/write time. Not good.
 
Thanks to all who replied!

I've spent some time fiddling with this system, and it seems that the PCI card works fine. The SATA disk appears in the BIOS' boot sequence settings as expected. I assume that I'm getting the full 1.5 Gbit/sec transfer rate, as per the card's specs, also considering that my PCI channel's spec reads 533 MByte/sec (about 5 Gbit/sec, I assume); so there shouldn't be a bottleneck there. I'm very happy that it all works :-) ...so far.

The reason I didn't get an IDE disk is because I wanted to stay with the most current technology. Considering that SATA costs about the same as PATA these days, the choice was easy. For now, the new SATA disk will host my primary OS (openSuSE Linux), but years from now it'll be an external storage disk placed in a housing, probably connected by eSATA.

But yeah, I almost went with the SATA-to-IDE converter since it allowed my disk to appear in the BIOS settings. But given your bad experiences with it, I'm glad you guys steered me away from it. Thanks again! :-)
 
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