holly123.

 Serial Advanced Technology Attachment [SATA] is the newer technology, than the Parallel Advanced Techology Attachment [PATA] hard drives.
You can read the documentation about the two systems here

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4700/sm/index.htm

 http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4600/en/4600/sm/index.htm

For more information try reading the following article from Tom's Hardware about SATA technology

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

Bev.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Message Edited by shesagordie on 08-19-2004 03:52 PM

and based from some testing, Ultra ATA is still better than SATA.

You know, no one ever talks about the fact that SATA does simultaneous read/write operations. Tom's hardware guide doesn't even mention it. These benchmarking tests don't really test it either. Here's a real simultaneous benchmark I did. I did this to make sure I was going to invest some money into serial ata.

compressing a 427MB file using standard windows xp zipping utility.

Both hard drives were clean installed on the same machine and defragged after the install.

7200 rpm ATA100- 253 seconds

7200 SATA 150 - 85 seconds.

I mean, that is the whole point of SATA. Parallel has to wait for each operation. Serial ATA has one serial cable for read and one serial cable for write. It's faster. How come so many SATA reviews have completely overlooked this?

It's overlooked because everyone is concerned with benchmarks rather than real world applications. I, too, noticed major disk I/O speedups I wasn't supposed to see (?) between my new 8300 (with SATA) over my old 8200 (with ATA). I've also seen "Hyperthreadiing" to be a performance boost of 10-20% on the power-hungry applications I run.