SATA or IDE as a boot drive?

[Guest]

Hi,

I have now enough parts to put together an Athlon64 3500+ based system on a
an Asus A8V m/board.

The board has two standard sata connectors as well as two for raid
configuration.

I have a number of hard drives that I can utilize for this machine. I have
decided to use two Seagate 160gig drives in a raid 0 configuration. These
drives will serve as the data drives.

I would like to use a separate drive as a boot drive. I have a Seagate IDE
160 gig drive as well as another sata drive, a Seagate 80 gig. Which one
(sata or ide)would be the best as a boot drive and application drive?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Shane

 

[Captain Ron]

I just built a system with the same specs and installed a 200 GB SATA as the
boot drive.. very fast. No hitches for installation. You could also setup
the boot as a raid which will help boost performace a bit

 

[John R Weiss]

I have a number of hard drives that I can utilize for this machine. I have
decided to use two Seagate 160gig drives in a raid 0 configuration. These
drives will serve as the data drives.

I would like to use a separate drive as a boot drive. I have a Seagate IDE
160 gig drive as well as another sata drive, a Seagate 80 gig. Which one
(sata or ide)would be the best as a boot drive and application drive?

SATA or PATA alone don't make a lot of difference when you're talking about
single drives. The difference will be in the physical HDD.

Most SATA HDDs today are simply IDE drives with the SATA interface. Their
performance will be essentially identical. The clear exception is the WD Raptor
10K RPM SATA drives -- 36 or 74 GB. The 74 is an improved design, not just a
double-platter 36. Either one will be large enough for the OS.

If you use RAID 0 for data, backup frequently! RAID 0 has virtually no fault
tolerance -- I lost my array in the XP SP2 upgrade, and had to rebuild from
scratch. You would be better advised to use RAID 1 for data, despite the
performance penalty.

 

[Ron Reaugh]

SATA or PATA alone don't make a lot of difference when you're talking about
single drives. The difference will be in the physical HDD.

Most SATA HDDs today are simply IDE drives with the SATA interface.

Most SCSI drives are ATA drives with SCSI interfaces or is it most ATA
drives are SCSI drives with ATA interfaces or is there any difference.

Their
performance will be essentially identical. The clear exception is the WD Raptor
10K RPM SATA drives -- 36 or 74 GB. The 74 is an improved design, not just a
double-platter 36. Either one will be large enough for the OS.

If you use RAID 0 for data, backup frequently! RAID 0 has virtually no fault
tolerance

It's fast but anti-fault tolerant.

-- I lost my array in the XP SP2 upgrade, and had to rebuild from
scratch. You would be better advised to use RAID 1 for data,

That really makes minimal difference as the secret is keeping good backups.

 

[John R Weiss]

Most SCSI drives are ATA drives with SCSI interfaces or is it most ATA
drives are SCSI drives with ATA interfaces or is there any difference.

Not from my experience...

For example, the Seagate Cheetah series of SCSI drives is significantly
different from their Barracuda series of IDE/SATA drives. I can't find any
current WD SCSI drives, but their old 18 GB SCSI were completely different (4
disks/8 heads) than their 20 GB IDE (3 disks).

 

[Pat Keith]

I used two 10,000 rpm matched sata drives in raid 0 for my boot disk. Very
fast. I also added two ide drives as well. My board only allows the sata
drives to be used in a raid configuation.

 

[zippy]

That really makes minimal difference as the secret is keeping good backups.

LOL. Fast and Flakey, huh Ron ?

Ooooohyeahhhh... that's what I want !!!

 

[Dee]

Hi,Although the user's manual and most other references don't make it
clear, you can run 2 SATA hard drives in a non-RAID configuration. You
just don't use the RAID configuration menu. I have 2 Hitachi 80GB SATA
with XP Pro as C:, D:, and P:. On the second I use two partitions: P:
for my Page file and D: is FAT32 for Data I can access in Linux or BSD.
C: is my OS all one partition for XP Pro. I use plug-in IDE drives
for WinME, XPx64, Linux, FreeBSD, and whatever else I need for different
projects. When the IDE is plugged in, it is the boot drive.