Serial ATA, the successor to parallel ATA (aka EIDE). It'll be more future proof and, if you ordered with 10,000 rpm Raptor drive, faster. Otherwise, you'll see no performance difference.

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@hgunn wrote:
My refurbed 8400 is coming with a SATA hard drive. What is SATA and what difference should I expect?

Thanks.

If you go and buy a PATA drive for real cheap during a sale you'll find no place to plug it in...  You'll need to either buy a Promise card to add ports or only buy SATA drives.

Thanks.. The invoice says the drive runs at 7200 rpm, so I guess my question was much ado about nothing much.:)

hgunn.

For more information read the following article from Tom's Hardware about SATA technology
Personally, it seems to be the technology of the future.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020812/index.html

Bev.
  

Has anyone tried SIIG or Adaptec PATA (UltraATA) PCI cards?

Do they work on Dimension 8400?

Assuming the installed SATA drive on a Dimension 8400 is on the motherboard outlet marked as SATA-0, would the best erformance on a second SATA drive be on the motherboard outlet marked SATA-1, SATA-2 or SATA-3?

Thanks.

A Dell tech and I had an interesting time of it yesterday, when XP suddenly couldn't find the hard drive on.

After much tinkering, it was finally fixed by changing the default SATA setting to EIDE in the bios, then doing a complete repair install of Windows. His other suggestion was to restore from the Dell partition, but that would have wiped out my partitions and stored data.

Device Manager now describes my hard drive controller as 'Utra ATA". It made no difference in the performance of the hard drive.