SATA vs IDE???

[raiyanb]

Hey everyone,

im in the middle of upgrading my PC and have changed my graphics card. But im on a budget so i was wondering whether i should spend around £70 on gettin an additional SATA 120GB HDD for my primary drive. What i want to know is if theres a big increase in speed when playing gamesthat make the price worthwile or would it be wiser to use the money on gettin a better grahics card??

THanks for any reply

[Jarhed7276]

Just a quick reply before I head to bed but I think you'd be better off putting your money on a better graphics card rather than a SATA drive.

[omega552003]

sata has almost no affect on games, but if you want to know heres the break down
ata100 = 100mb/s (most drives)
ata133 = 133mb/s (Maxtor drives)
SATA = 150mb/s (will be going faster)
SCSI = 320mb/s (industrial drives, but the best)

[muarrif]

SATA makes a bid difference if you are setting up RAID 0 or 1 or 0+1 but I wouldn't think so for a single drive that will be used for games.

Better off gettig a better graphics card

[Peter M]

What omega said is just the theoretical interface bandwidth. Between SATA and IDE difference, there is _no_ difference in the actual media throughput. Quite the opposite in fact - many SATA drives still use converter chips, which actually makes them slower than their parallel IDE siblings.

[lone1dog]

I run a single raptor 360 and I can say that I sacrificed space for speed.Wish I had at least 80 gigs of drive because I game.But don't go sata unless your putting dual drives for a raid configuration,and thats gonna cost.I have never had a seagate but would cosider one.I plan on ugrading my to dual someday because I have a buddy has one set up and it is sweet to game on or anything else.Thats my believe.Stay with a 7200 drive 8mb

[kwebb]

Some numbers were listed earlier with a small b, as in bit. Should be B, as in byte. By and large you've got good advice. Moving to SATA won't affect your gaming experience. It would make a small difference, negligible really, in data throughput.

[sechs]

Actually, as Peter M mentions, it could have a negative effect on performance....

[ArcticFox]

Better graphics card for gaming.........and you could have an 8GB/s for your hard drive but it wouldn't make any difference unless you have a drive that could read or burst faster than 133MB/s or 150MB/s, ATA or SATA respectively.

What video card do you have now? How about HD space and spindle speed?

[raiyanb]

hey

right now ive got a GeForce FX5200 but im going to upgrde it to a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. I think my HDD is running at 7200rpm. Its a 120GB Western Digital.