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[Martin_1962]

While looking at drives - trying to see how many GB I can get for my money I have noticed that you can get adaptors as per title - for about a fiver!

That means I can drag all my data drives to a new PC in the future

[Markjay]

Yes this is one way of copying data across from old drives to new ones, the other way is an external USB to SATA/IDE adapter, and yet another is simply plugging-in the old IDE drive in the new SATA PC using the CD-ROM/DVD connector (which is still IDE, even on new PCs).

However these are all temporary data transfer solutions but not recommended for permanent use – for one, SATA (and SATA-II) is much faster than IDE, and using an SATA/IDE adapter (either way) will always result in downgrading to IDE performance….

[TheBoy]

personally, i've found the adapters to perform badly.  the cost of hdd now, it ain't worth the effort. just get a new system...

[Taxi_Driver]

Just outa interest.....how does SATA compare with SCSI drives?
One of my PC's has SCSI drives

PC in question has

Adaptec AIC 7899 controller built into motherboard with

Quantum Atlas 10k 9WLS 160 (9Gb disk purely used for XP system)
Quantum Atlas V18 WLS 160 (18Gb used for Prog Files)

Then 2 x adaptec 2940 controllers with various 18G disks and 40G tape drive hanging of them

I know the PC is old and 2940 controllers are old too.....but just wondered how it compared with SATA disks???

Slight thread highjack Martin......so soz about that but didnt think it woz worthy of a new thread and is a bit related!

[Markjay]

Just a quick note - I must have installed a hundered Quantum Atlas drives (before Maxtor took-over Quantum's SCSI drive division) of various models, and in nearly 10 years had only two drives go faulty. All of them saw heavy use in servers, mainly in factories, some of them still spin in file-servers to this day. The Quantum Atlas drives seem indestructible, never seen any drive come near it in reliability.

[Markjay]

New drives are always faster than old drives, so a new IDE or SATA drive will be faster than and old SCSI drives. Having said that, when SCSI and IDE/SATA devices of the same technological age are compared (currently SCSI U320 or SAS SCSI on PCI-e or PCI-x controller, compared to SATA-II), SCSI will always have better performance.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that IDE/SATA does not have a controller as such – the on-board controller uses the PC’s CPU for processing the disk requests. SCSI HBAs (controller cards) have dedicated on-board processors, which range from modest to very-fast with on-board cache depending on the controller model.

The second is that IDE/SATA drives are generally aimed at the desktop and entry-level server market, where cost is important so tend to be made with price in mind, while SCSI drives are typically aimed at high end graphic desktop and medium-size servers so will have better performance built-in though obviously at a higher cost.

[Martin_1962]

I'm mainly concerned about capacity for AVIs.

[Ken T]

Its interesting what you were saying about drive reliability.  I just finished a job repairing Sky Digiboxes, the ones with built in 120G drives. Drive failure was a common problem, some not a year old. Something about their use in these boxes that wears them out.

[Martin_1962]

Its interesting what you were saying about drive reliability.  I just finished a job repairing Sky Digiboxes, the ones with built in 120G drives. Drive failure was a common problem, some not a year old. Something about their use in these boxes that wears them out.

My PVR had a Fujitsu MHS2020AT in it I replaced with a MHV2100AT for capacity

These drives are pretty reliable

[TheBoy]

Its interesting what you were saying about drive reliability.  I just finished a job repairing Sky Digiboxes, the ones with built in 120G drives. Drive failure was a common problem, some not a year old. Something about their use in these boxes that wears them out.

My PVR had a Fujitsu MHS2020AT in it I replaced with a MHV2100AT for capacity

These drives are pretty reliable

Fishitsu did have a reliability problem, which looks like they have got over now...

[bexandpower]

I have found the Samsung Spin point drives to be both quiet and reliable. I had alot of trouble with seagate for a while (they kept loosing clusters). And as far as adapter leads go you may as well buy a newer board for about £25 + VAT. A 400Gb samsung spin point is about £65 + VAT roughly.

[supermop]

IDE: old and busted
SATA: old and busted
SATAII: new hotness

I have always found Segate drives to be very reliable. Only had 1 die on me, which was a very old 8GB barracuda, and that served me well. I have found Fujitsu drives fail often (at least the older ones), and I've had a couple of Western Digital drives pop too, but had excellent performance from them. Seagate are pioneers of perpendicular magnetic recording too - a new way of storing data which means you get a whole lot more information in a whole lot less physical space.

Best manufacturers IMO are Seagate and Western Digital.

Also, MJ mentioned that new optical drives (cd/dvd drives) still use IDE. Well they don't, everything new has switched to SATAII, but you can obviously still find IDE drives on sale as new. They are probably old stock though.

Martin: for lots of AVI's, you will need a lot of storage capacity. They are generally huge files, and with HD rapidly becoming the norm, they suck up even more disk space. A large cache is also one to look out for, like 16mb. Improves data read and write speed immensely.

[TheBoy]

IDE: old and busted
SATA: old and busted
SATAII: new hotness

I have always found Segate drives to be very reliable. Only had 1 die on me, which was a very old 8GB barracuda, and that served me well. I have found Fujitsu drives fail often (at least the older ones), and I've had a couple of Western Digital drives pop too, but had excellent performance from them. Seagate are pioneers of perpendicular magnetic recording too - a new way of storing data which means you get a whole lot more information in a whole lot less physical space.

Best manufacturers IMO are Seagate and Western Digital.

Also, MJ mentioned that new optical drives (cd/dvd drives) still use IDE. Well they don't, everything new has switched to SATAII, but you can obviously still find IDE drives on sale as new. They are probably old stock though.

Martin: for lots of AVI's, you will need a lot of storage capacity. They are generally huge files, and with HD rapidly becoming the norm, they suck up even more disk space. A large cache is also one to look out for, like 16mb. Improves data read and write speed immensely.

All drive manufacturers have had their bouts of unreliability. Seagate were the first to suffer, but seemed to have learnt from it.  WD also went through same fate, but lasted longer.  Most drives come with 3yr warranty (retail packed drives, not OEM drives), so they are confident of the drives now...

SATA or SATA2 are OK. Both are compatible with each other, and way faster than drives.  The biggest cache on retail drives is 16Mb, so the SATA2 interface does not offer any real world advantage currently. However, everything is SATA2 now, so whatever you buy, it will be later spec.

IDE is still the most common optical drive interface on new systems, despite attempts to move forward. This is mainly due to SATA optical drives still holding a premium (as most are PATA with an adapter - the performance of the adapter is not an issue on optical drives).  The OEM bumf I get sent fortnightly (used to be a systems integrator) suggests the industry (integrators, not manufacturers) is undecided on which way to go with optical - it will be a brave chipset manfacturer who pulls IDE support (it would probably have to be Intel).

[Martin_1962]

Both drives are nearly full at the moment - I prefer Seagate - both are that

ISOs take up a lot of room and you can only get 20 minutes of DV on a DVD

[supermop]

IDE is still the most common optical drive interface on new systems, despite attempts to move forward. This is mainly due to SATA optical drives still holding a premium (as most are PATA with an adapter - the performance of the adapter is not an issue on optical drives).  The OEM bumf I get sent fortnightly (used to be a systems integrator) suggests the industry (integrators, not manufacturers) is undecided on which way to go with optical - it will be a brave chipset manfacturer who pulls IDE support (it would probably have to be Intel).

Yes, true. I bought a new board (Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe) and it only has 1 IDE channel. Consequently I have had to ditch all my IDE drvies except my CD/DVD burner. I imagine that is a first step to going totally SATA2 and it's an nVidia chipset.

I'm sure the industry will switch totally to SATA2 eventually, but will be at least a year or 2 before you see the first SATA only boards come out i reckon. I don't think pulling the plug totally on IDE is going to make too many people or companies unhappy... after all, whats the price of an all-in-one optical drive these days? £30 roughly. Ok, that may add up for large scale IT systems, but its better than a kick in the teeth.