Is Ultra-ATA compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or compatible with Serial-ATA ?

[Oliver Boswell]

As the subject alerady said I want to know if
Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or compatible with Serial-ATA ?

If Serial-ATA is the answer: Is Ultra-ATA better or worse then (Serial)-ATA ?

Oliver

 

[Shenan Stanley]

As the subject alerady said I want to know if
Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or
compatible with Serial-ATA ?

If Serial-ATA is the answer: Is Ultra-ATA better or worse then
(Serial)-ATA ?

Go with SATA.
SATA is the standard now.

The cables are different (as is the protocol/drives/etc..) for the three you
mentioned - although you *could* use regular 40 wire cables with
UltraATA/ATA... You lose out and are not actually getting everything you
could out of it.

Of course - there are SATA/SATA2 drives out there - and in order to utilize
their full functionality - all things muct be ready to do so in the chain of
hardware (drive, cable, connection to motherboard...)

SATA is faster... SATA2 even more so. None of that matters if the drive
access is not your bottleneck in your current system.

 

[Odie Ferrous]

Go with SATA.
SATA is the standard now.

The cables are different (as is the protocol/drives/etc..) for the three you
mentioned - although you *could* use regular 40 wire cables with
UltraATA/ATA... You lose out and are not actually getting everything you
could out of it.

Of course - there are SATA/SATA2 drives out there - and in order to utilize
their full functionality - all things muct be ready to do so in the chain of
hardware (drive, cable, connection to motherboard...)

SATA is faster... SATA2 even more so. None of that matters if the drive
access is not your bottleneck in your current system.

Not in my experience, it's not. Actually, there's little difference in
real-world speed between ATA66 and SATA-300, although you can get more
powerful controllers (Areca) for the latter, which *do* make a
difference.

And I think any system more powerful than a P3 1GHz is going to be
bottlenecked at the hard drive I/O. In other words, the vast majority
of systems out there today.

But that's just my take on the issue.



Odie

 

[JS]

There is no hardware compatibility between Ultra ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA
(SATA).
Ultra ATA (133Mb transfer rate) is roughly the equivalent of SATA-1 (150Mb
transfer rate) however other factors such as the drives buffer size (2, 8
and 16MB) could make a PATA drive with a large buffer out perform a SATA-1
drive with a smaller buffer under some circumstances.

SATA-2 (300Mb transfer rate) should easily out perform an Ultra ATA drive,
however not all manufacture's SATA-2 drives are equal in performance.

JS

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

As the subject alerady said I want to know if
Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or
compatible with Serial-ATA ?

What do you mean by "compatible"?

If you're asking whether the cables, controllers, etc, are the same, no they
are not.

If you're asking whether they can coexist in the same computer, yes they
can.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Not in my experience, it's not. Actually, there's little difference in
real-world speed between ATA66 and SATA-300, although you can get more
powerful controllers (Areca) for the latter, which *do* make a
difference.

And I think any system more powerful than a P3 1GHz is going to be
bottlenecked at the hard drive I/O. In other words, the vast majority
of systems out there today.

But that's just my take on the issue.

I have a pair of Samsungs which are identical, except for the
interface. One is ATA100, one SATA. No speed differencfe noticeable.
I agree that a P3@1GHz should be able to saturate most current 7200
rpm disks in some applications. And of course if you have two disks
on an ATA bus, some modern disks already can deliver a bit more data
than ATA133 can transport, which gives SATA an edge in some
situations. But keep in mind that PCI has a theroetical upper
speed limit of 135MB/s and a practical limit on a slower chipset
more like 70-80MB/s or so.

Arno

 

[SMS]

I have a pair of Samsungs which are identical, except for the
interface. One is ATA100, one SATA. No speed differencfe noticeable.
I agree that a P3@1GHz should be able to saturate most current 7200
rpm disks in some applications. And of course if you have two disks
on an ATA bus, some modern disks already can deliver a bit more data
than ATA133 can transport, which gives SATA an edge in some
situations. But keep in mind that PCI has a theroetical upper
speed limit of 135MB/s and a practical limit on a slower chipset
more like 70-80MB/s or so.

In practice, the cache hits in the L2 cache, and in the system memory
used for cache, make the difference theoretical, except in applications
where there would be both few cache hits, and a need for the higher data
rates. Such applications aren't that rare any more, such as non-linear
video editing.

Forget about PCI's bandwidth, as PCI Express is what is used in the
latest systems.