SATA drive ?

[Michael Hipp]

Vu Pham wrote:
  > How about the hard drive ? I guess the SATA is good enough. Which 
SATA drive
> is a fast one now ?

SATA is definitely the way of the future. But, at present, unless you go 
for at least a 10,000 RPM drive it is a waste of money. Most 7200 RPM 
drives only have data transfer rates of about 30-40MB/sec - barely 
enough to fully utilize an ATA-33, much less an ATA 100 or SATA 150. So 
don't expect it to speed things up noticably. (It does use somewhat less 
CPU to obtain the given speed, but the extent to which this matters on a 
very fast CPU is debatable.)

Also beware that a lot of the SATA drives and controllers are really 
just IDE stuff with a SATA converter chip in front and they are actually 
somewhat slower even than IDE (because of the conversion step).

The cabling for SATA is sure a lot nicer.

Michael