27 May
2006
27 May
'06
12:29 a.m.
Better or not, most OEMs are driving hard to eliminate
IDE. SATA gives a
reduction in cable costs, connector costs, test fixtures, etc. This can be
a big saving on a large array. Plus less physical cable space needed, and a
small but significant power savings in drivers. Finally, it gets rid of
some of the skew problems for parallel transfers as the speed ramped up. ATA
was getting so bad that cable length was only 8 inches at the highest
transfer speed.
I personally have no clue as to which is the better interface (given the
choice, I'd go with SCSI), as I've not found the time to research the issue.
However, from a cabling standpoint I prefer SATA, plugging and unplugging a
SATA drive is just plain better than IDE from everything I've seen, and the
smaller cables are better for cooling. Plus you can get things such as the
10k RPM WD Raptor's and the 500GB drives that are starting to become
available. All in all, if I was building a new system and had to choose
between SATA and IDE, I'd go SATA.
The only downside I see to SATA is that some of the neat gadgets that are
available for IDE aren't available for SATA.
Right now for the project I'm looking at the "dongle" device for, I have a
large investment in IDE drives (I've purchased those but not an enclosure),
but going forward I want to be able to just purchase SATA drives.
Zane