Sata V Nvidia IDE

I have been thinking of using the SATA ports on my Abit NF7S V2.0 Board. i am using the IDE port at the mo with a 80 gig drive but would like to add a second drive for other files etc so i would not have to keep mixing every thing on the same drive has the windows XP OS , has it seems to be slowing it down a lot now.
What i need to know would i be better of with a new IDE drive or SATA drive.
Also would the SATA interface be faster then using the IDE port 2nd Master with the Nvidia IDE drivers and i would also end up have share the SATA IRQ with another PCI which i am thinking will maybe slow things down a little. Any help please.

From experience I can say that the only SATA drives which are faster than PATA (standard drives are not referred to as IDE, as it means integrated drive electronics which both PATA and SATA are) are the 10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptors.

What is your optical drive arrangement? As we all know, having an optical device on the same channel slows that channel down to the speed of the slowest device, however I seem to recall this only being true of when the slower drive is in operation.

Therefore, if you connect a new PATA hard disk to the secondary channel as a master, and put your optical drive on as the slave, it should work fine. Of course, any optical drive operations at the same time as transferring data would slow things down.

You *could* also use a PATA drive on the SATA controller using Abit's Serillel adapter if you have the NF7-S, or use a SATA hard disk on the controller and not affect the PATA channels if you want to. However this is no benefit to this, as mentioned above the SATA drives do not feel faster at all unless it's a raptor. Also, definitely keep the OS drive on PATA.

If boot-up times are important to you, stick with PATA as the SATA RAID BIOS takes a few extra seconds to detect drives and allow the system to boot. This can be reduced by having the latest BIOS version of course.

Hope this helps!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DaftpuNk

What is your optical drive arrangement? As we all know, having an optical device on the same channel slows that channel down to the speed of the slowest device, however I seem to recall this only being true of when the slower drive is in operation.

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I thought it was only if the slowest drive was the primary/master...

And yes I'd get a sata...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DaftpuNk

From experience I can say that the only SATA drives which are faster than PATA (standard drives are not referred to as IDE, as it means integrated drive electronics which both PATA and SATA are) are the 10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptors.

What is your optical drive arrangement? As we all know, having an optical device on the same channel slows that channel down to the speed of the slowest device, however I seem to recall this only being true of when the slower drive is in operation.

Therefore, if you connect a new PATA hard disk to the secondary channel as a master, and put your optical drive on as the slave, it should work fine. Of course, any optical drive operations at the same time as transferring data would slow things down.

You *could* also use a PATA drive on the SATA controller using Abit's Serillel adapter if you have the NF7-S, or use a SATA hard disk on the controller and not affect the PATA channels if you want to. However this is no benefit to this, as mentioned above the SATA drives do not feel faster at all unless it's a raptor. Also, definitely keep the OS drive on PATA.

If boot-up times are important to you, stick with PATA as the SATA RAID BIOS takes a few extra seconds to detect drives and allow the system to boot. This can be reduced by having the latest BIOS version of course.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks for the info DaftpuNk when you say definitely keep the OS drive on PATA is that because the pata ide drive would be faster in use than the sata controller based drive (other than the Raptor) or in other words would the IDE `s Controllers with the Nvidia drivers be faster than the onboard SATA with silicon image 3112 drivers.

It dont matter! neither drive will reach the limit of the bus or chip!

I'd go with SATA because it sounds better :p