advantage in sata over ide in external enclosure?

[rektek]

hi.

im planning to buy a fanless external 3.5" harddrive (firewire) enclosure for my music production computer, and i will be using that for: sample storage, recording and streaming samples.

this will also be used with my laptop (so a sata-connector ext.enclosure is not an option)

i was wondering if there is any advantge (in actual performance) of getting a firewire SATA enclosure versus a firewire IDE enclosure.

thanx

[BlindMelon7]

I would have thought SATA would be better mainly because its easier to set up

[dave87]

SATA (even over USB) is quicker than EIDE (that was based upon using 2 comparable IcyBoxes) and always has the option of the ESATA connection if the computer supports it

[rektek]

ok, i know the conventional reasons why sata is better/faster than IDE...

but in this case....firewire would be a bottleneck for both formats no?

cause even if sata is at least 150 mBps
and IDE is 133 at best...

firewire is around the 40 range right?

so thats why im wondering if there is any point in getting firewire sata versus firewire ide

[BlindMelon7]

Which one is cheaper?

Also, according to Wikipedia, firewire 800 runs at 786.432 Mbit/s.

[Choo Choo]

Even firewire 800 will have a maximum transfer rate of 100MB/s so technically yeah, it will be a bottleneck.

However hard drives won't sustain their maximum transfer rate so in the end I don't know if it really matters 'that' much.

[rektek]

ide drives are cheaper (by just a bit)
but ide firewire enclosures are alot cheaper than sata firewire enclosures

also, just for reference - i am refering to firewire 400 (1394a)

...

so besides the transfer speed....is there any other advantages with SATA?

[dave87]

I did see a test of two IcyBoxes (USB admittedly), one with a SATA drive in it, the other with an IDE drive in it, and the SATA drive came out ahead in the performance stakes, even though they are both bottlenecked by the USB interface, hence my suggestion of SATA.

If performance isn't as much of an issue, then IDE on a purely cost basis may be your best bet

Dave

[shaithis]

That must be down to a bad/inefficient IDE>USB conversion though if both were supposedly bottlenecked by the USB interface.

IMO, the only advantages SATA have over IDE right now are availability and cable tidyness.

[dave87]

That was what I was thinking, however if speed was of the upmost importance, the SATA drive would be the better one...

[chuckskull]

SATA may have NCQ and such too.