IDE, SATA Put To the Test

IDE hard drives used in most PCs are essentially obsolete and should be replaced with SATA (Serial ATA) drives in new shipments of PCs. For a systems builder, this situation presents a great opportunity to distinguish yourself from Tier 1 vendors with state-of-the-art storage for a small price differential.

IDE (ATA) hard-drive technology is based on parallel data processing, which means that information traveling from the drive to the data bus is sent in bulk in a random fashion--the data comes off the hard drive in random time intervals, hits the data bus and then heads off to its final destination. This technology has been the industry standard of PC hard drives since about 1990, when it replaced the old MFM and ESDI drives. That was back in the day when the average hard drive only provided about 200 MB of storage.

IDE hard drives also use very wide ribbon cables, which tend to clog up the inside of a PC. One of my biggest frustrations over the years has come from trying to get the ribbon cables of an IDE hard drive and CD-ROM to sit nicely inside a PC case. The connectors on IDE hard drives can also be a pain. On occasion, the drive sits in a cramped spot, and it's almost impossible to get my fingers to the place where the cable needs to attach to the drive.

SATA hard-drive technology, on the other hand, is based on serial data processing, which means that information traveling from the drive to the data bus is clocked and sent in an orderly fashion. The data leaves the hard drive in timed intervals, hits the data bus and then heads off to its final destination.

SATA drives transmit data at an average speed of 150 Mbps (and, this year, 3.0-Gbps SATA technology is due out); compare that with the 133-Mbps data-transmission rate provided by IDE drives. In addition, SATA hard drives use thin-ribbon cables with clip-on connectors, which are simple to work with, even in the most cramped corners of the PC case.

Interestingly, in my own head-to-head performance comparison between three systems--an older PC newly configured with a SATA drive and two new PCs, both with new IDE drives--I uncovered significant underperformance in IDE technology.

The old PC is my trusty, 4-year-old Compaq Presario 5WV254. This system contains an AMD Duron 700-MHz CPU and 512 MB of RAM; the OS is Windows XP Professional. For this recipe, I upgraded the system with a Maxtor 6Y120 SATA hard drive.

New PC #1 is a Compaq Presario Pentium 4 system. It boasts a 3.0-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 512 MB of RAM and Windows XP Professional. Storage is provided by a 7,200-rpm IDE hard drive.

New PC #2 is a Compaq Presario SR1100NX, with a 2.53-GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 256 MB of RAM and Windows XP Professional. The hard drive is a 5,400-rpm Seagate Barracuda ST340015A.

The first test I ran was a generic file transfer. To keep everything apples to apples, I took the system folder of Windows XP called c: > windows > system32. On any given system running Windows XP, this folder will contain about 330 MB contained in approximately 2,000 files. I created a new folder on the c: drive, then opened a DOS window to issue the manual command copy > c: > windows system32 > *.* (which any old-timer knows will copy all the files from the windows > system32 folder to the new folder). The results I came away with were both surprising and astounding (see "And the Winner Is... SATA," below, left).

Next, I performed what I refer to as my "time to boot" test. This test measures the time it takes to boot Windows XP from the opening banner to the initial display of the desktop (see chart for results). Again, my old PC proved its mettle.

David Kary ([email protected]) is the founder and CEO of rippt.com.