Re: should I get SATA drives for old PC?
Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 2009-07-29 08:54, Steve Kleene wrote:
>> Before I build a Lenny system on my 5-year-old PC, I want to replace
the two internal hard drives. I'm not too swift with hardware specs and
want to make sure I get the right drives. I will probably get 500GB
drives and do not expect to set up RAID.
>>
>> The drives now are Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 6K040L0 40GB 7200 RPM
IDE Ultra ATA133. There isn't much of a selection anymore with the
ATA100 or ATA133 interfaces; most new drives are SATA 3 GB/s.
>
> I'd use the PATA drive as the boot disk. BIOSes (especially 5yo
ones!) just seem to like IDE devices better.
The largest PATA drive available is 500GB. Ron is correct, if you
already have a suitable PATA drive, use it for boot.
>
>> The motherboard is an Asus P4P800 Deluxe. It has two SATA
connectors and came with the cables. The motherboard manual says, "The
current Serial ATA interface allows up to 150 MB/s data transfer rate"
(i.e. >133).
>>
>> So now to the questions:
>>
>> 1. What difficulties (if any) might I expect in setting up the SATA
drives? A quick search found quite a few posts where people had to mess
with the BIOS, add a SATA driver, etc. with this motherboard.
You may need to jumper a SATA drive to limit it to 1.5Gb/s. Even though
compatibility is alleged to be there between drives and motherboards of
different standards, there are sometimes exceptions.
> The driver *should* be in the stock kernel. BIOS fiddling is
possible, but not difficult. You'll probably only need to tell it which
of your drives to boot from.
>> 2. If I buy a SATA 3 GB/s drive, will this motherboard only give me
150 MB/s anyway? In that case maybe I should just go with ATA100 or
ATA133. I assume either would work.
Probably. Yes, the limit will be in the speed of the interface. If the
MB is 1.5Gb/s, then so will the hard disk.
> Modern rotational devices don't even saturate ATA133, much less
SATA-1, and nowhere near the "SATA II"/3Gbps capability. Fortunately,
SATA II drives are backwards compatible.
>
> So, I'd put the OS on the IDE drive, and /home and swap on the SATA drive
Newer SATA drives can be had in sizes up to 2TB, and are nice and fast,
so do consider making one of your drives a SATA drive. In other words,
I agree with Ron.
You may want to consider an SSD for either drive. They have some
advantages, depending on what you are doing. Solid State Drives have no
moving parts and some of them are very fast. They are expensive. You
may wish to read up on them on anandtech.com and other sites that test
and review drives. They are SATA drives.
You can use a SATA drive with an IDE/PATA interface using an adapter.
The adapters are fairly cheap, and seem to work fine. If you want to
buy only SATA drives, these adapters may be something to look into.
If you haven't bought the drives, you could buy two IDE/PATA hard
drives, and get a SATA DVD drive, or a Blu-Ray drive. (All Blu-Ray
drives are SATA.)
Mark Allums
_______________
Sorry, sent this to Ron by mistake.
MAA
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