IDE vs. SATA Hard Drive Review

IDE or SATA Hard Drive?

New kid on the block for hard drives, SATA, What is it? SATA stands for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment.

Before I get to SATA we need to understand what IDE is and why SATA is better.

Integrated Drive Electronics, IDE, was introduced in the early 1990's as a way to get around the built in drive tables in the bios for computers; tables that every pc had. There is a limitation on the drive size built into the tables, the limitation is calculated on: the number of heads, the number of cylinders, and the number of tracks physically contained within the drive. The maximum of all these parameters can only be 1024. There had to be a way to fool the bios when the drive is larger than 30 meg. IDE does this by telling the controller that the drive is only 30 meg. This worked for a while, then when Intel introduced the 486 processor the bios was rewritten to remove the drive tables from the bios and add the IDE controller as a function. This removed the 1024 limitation and opened the door for larger drives.

The IDE function is split into two distinct parts; the IDE interface, and the IDE controller component. The interface is just that, a way to connect the drive to the computer mother board. The controller is part of the drive, all functions but one are integrated into the electronics of the drive. The one function that is not built into the IDE controller is the drive selection. That originally was a manual function, then became a part of the bios function. The selections were master or slave, then came cable select. Cable select is by which connector on the IDE cable the drive is connected to. By removing one wire from the cable to the last connector the bios knows which drive is master and which drive is slave.

As with all devices when they are new or just introduced they are the wiz bang of the day. The speed of the IDE drives was phenomenal at the time, SCSI was struggling to just keep up. Through put had quadrupled over night. Drive size will reach beyond 200 gig. Reliability will reach a all time high of over 200,000 hours between failures. This means that the average hard drive will operate beyond the lifetime of the computer.

Your IDE drive is still a viable device, I would not throw away a perfectly good drive just to have the latest and greatest. If the drive has failed or is to small then by all means upgrade.

SATA, what is it? Why do I need it? Is it expensive?

Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or SATA:

Pros:

SATA uses the IDE controller concept on the haed drive to control the drives functions. Using two pairs of signal wires the data-connection is unidirectional. Utilizing Low Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) increase the signal rate to a higher capacity of 1.5 to 3.0 gigabit per second. The 8B/10B encoding is 80% higher in efficiency than the traditional parallel transfer encoding of the IDE interface. The 8B/10B encoding is also used in the newer Ethernet, Fibre Channel, PCI Express, and other devices. With the correct controller you can use a raid array to protect your data.

Cons:

Only one device can be attached to a cable. This means each device requires an interface connection and a cable. (Since this article has been written the manufactures have been busy, you can now get an interface that will support 16 devices!)

Rating:

I give the SATA device a rating of 9 out of 10, the reason is that each device needs it's own cable and interface, when the manufactures get around to creating a way to chain more than one device on a cable I will give it a 10 over all. When technology moves forward you gain in functionality. With the SATA device you gain an enormous speed in through put for your data, couple this with the ever increasing capacity of hard drives and you are getting even more for your hard earned dollar. If you have an older mother board you will have to purchase a SATA controller card to go with the drive, the newer motherboards have interface connectors built into them, along with the External SATA connectors for external devices. At this time the manufactures are working on a 6 gigabyte per second devices.

Pricing:

Contrary to popular practices the SATA devices are cheaper than the older devices, normally new technology devices cost twice to four times as much as older technology. Such as a SATA drive that has twice the capacity of an IDE drive at the same price.

This is truly a more bang for your buck deal.

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