I thought a Sata 300mbs 8meg casche hdd would be faster then a 6 year old ide 7200rpm drive. But it seems like they are the same. I mean the os performs the same as it did, games are the same. Do I maybe not have something setup exactly right? Thanks for any input!

Lots of info with a 3 second google search. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...

You're talking maybe 5 to 10 MB/sec ?? Not sure if this would very apparent to the end user in general use. Search Engines Are Your Friends ☺ Morpheus: There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. "The Matrix"

"Do I maybe not have something setup exactly right?" While the disk may seem slow simply because of your desired expectations. Fact is - your (SATA 3Gb/s) drive's sustainable tranfer speed isn't any faster than the manufacturer expects it to be, advertised burst speed for the most part is never achieved - but it helps to move the merchandise ;-) Practically there's hardly any impressionable speed difference nor performance disparity between similar PATA & SATA disks. However, you could have gotten a SATA disk with twice the cache or even a 10,000RPM is you really wanted something faster.

How old is the mboard? Mboards that support SATA-2 at 300mb/sec haven't been around for all that long. E.g. If the max IDE burst data transfer rate is 133mb/sec, and the max SATA burst data transfer rate is 150mb/sec on that mboard, you're not going to see much difference, as Zenith said. That applies even if you use a SATA card capable of 300mb/sec to connect the new drive to - the 150mb/sec (or less)is a limit built into the mboard chipset. And that's at the rarely achieved max burst rate - the maximum sustained data transfer rate is about a third of that and hasn't changed much in the intervening 6 years. If you had less ram, you would probably see a small difference because the cache on the new drive is probably larger, but with your 1gb of ram the cache on the hard drive isn't used as much as it would be with less ram.

Ahh okay thanks for the 411!! This is my motherboard Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 I went to their website and it says up to 150MB/s data transfer rate