Hard drive speeds

Right now I'm using a good old western digital 40 gig hardrive (IDE). Just
how much faster is Serial Ata? Is it worth it? Are there any pitfalls? On
a gaming machine, would it speed up gameplay to have serial ata as oppose to
ide? Or just loading? Thanks again.. last question for a bit, since this
is my third in a few minutes.

~Chris

Chris Martin wrote:

Right now I'm using a good old western digital 40 gig hardrive (IDE). Just
how much faster is Serial Ata? Is it worth it? Are there any pitfalls? On
a gaming machine, would it speed up gameplay to have serial ata as oppose to
ide? Or just loading? Thanks again.. last question for a bit, since this
is my third in a few minutes.

Most SATAs use the same mechanical "inerds" as the PATAs. The elecronics are
different, and can accomodate up to 150Mhz on the serial interface. The present
EDE drive parallel interface, (ATA133), can work up to 133MHz, but no drive
now made can output data at that rate.

The main advantage of SATA is smaller data/power cables, single drive per
cable, and the ability to easily achieve greater data rates when drives are
available in the future.

Virg Wall
--

It is vain to do with more
what can be done with fewer.
William of Occam.

Chris Martin wrote:
Right now I'm using a good old western digital 40 gig hardrive (IDE).
Just how much faster is Serial Ata? Is it worth it? Are there any
pitfalls? On a gaming machine, would it speed up gameplay to have
serial ata as oppose to ide? Or just loading? Thanks again.. last
question for a bit, since this is my third in a few minutes.

Hard drives using the SATA interface are not currently any faster than
7200RPM PATA hard drives. The exception to this is the 10,000 RPM Raptor
series, from Western Digital. These perform, roughly, on par with 10K SCSI
drives.