What exactly is the difference, and what are the pros/cons of both? They'll be functioning in RAID 1, BTW.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-16,GGLD:en&q=sata+vs+sata+ii

If this is a home computer, you will see no difference. The benefits of SATAII would only be evident in a server environment.

Michael J

certainly what Michael J says isn't fairly true. if you do any kind of music production or video production; formatting/encoding/capture/conversion,etc or any kind of gaming at all you'll notice quite a difference. sata runs at 1.5Gbps; sataII at 3.0Gbps.

"certainly what Michael J says isn't fairly true. if you do any kind of music production or video production; formatting/encoding/capture/conversion,etc or any kind of gaming at all you'll notice quite a difference. sata runs at 1.5Gbps; sataII at 3.0Gbps."

NO THEY DO NOT! The SATA interface is "capable" of 1.5Gbps and the SATAII interface is "capable" of 3.0Gbps. But the fact remains that the hard drives themselves are physically the same and have around a 60-70Mbps maximum throughput. There is no drive in existence that can saturate even a ATA100 interface, let alone the available bandwidth for SATA or SATAII.

All you have to do is look at the benchmarks. In this benchmark you can see that the #2 and #3 fastest drives are the same model from the same manufacturer, except one is SATA and the other is IDE.

There are some minor performance gains from SATA, but not that you would ever notice in real world use.
Michael J

I guess until the technology improves, it would make sense to use cheaper IDE ATA 100 and 133 HDDs then

Not necessarily. There are benefits to SATA. People just need to understand that the interface bandwidth does not affect the drive speed (unless you put a drive on an interface that cannot keep up with the drive).

For example, using SATA you do not need to worry about mutiple devices on the same channel. Usually any cost saving between SATA and IDE is small, so I would go SATA - unless there is a really good deal on some IDE drives.

Michael J

There usually are:

http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4596277

That deal is not that great.

That's a 300GB drive for $90 ($.030/Gig)

New Egg has deals on SATA drives that are about the same.

250GB for $75 ($.030/Gig)
320GB for $109 ($034/Gig)

So, again I would go with SATA.

Michael J

Thanks a million guys. Right now I'm looking at some Western Digital Caviar 250GB WD2500KS drives.