MC82

Hey, Im new to the world of SATA drives, and its time to get a new hard drive since my last WD hard drive just got a S.M.A.R.T. Failure.

Anyways, here is my question

I just bought the the ASUS AV8 Deluxe Motherboard for an Athlon 64 socket 939 . I am trying to buy two SATA drives so that I can set them up as RAID 0

I have my mind set on just gettting a Seagate 80gb SATA hard drive when I realized that there are actually two different ones, a SATA and a SATA II version. What I need to know is does my motherboard support just SATA or both SATA and SATA II?

SATA Drive

or

SATA II Drive


If someone could tell me whether it supports it or not and if 5 more dollars per a drive is worth the money on getting a SATA II drive instead.

here is a link to my motherboard

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Steevo

Sata 2 is a joke just like SATA transfer rate itself is. No single SATA drive on the market that I am aware of has the capability to maintain a continuous transfer of 150MBps. The area that is does help in though is in burst reads and writes to the on disk buffer. I use twin Maxtor 120Gb drives and the transfer rate slows after the first couple of Mb up.



More important and faster access can be achieved with NCQ Native Command Queing, it allows the drive to make the decisions. http://www.seagate.com/products/inte...ta/native.html
Common home drives are moving closer and closer to SCSI drives, higher RPM and onboard control.

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MC82

so your saying there is no point in getting the SATA drive.

when you mention that it slows down, it does not slow down more then what a PATA drive would run at. right?

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ming

PATA/SATA they both cant maintain the max transfer rate stated. The max rate stated is the burst rate which lasts anything upto 30secs.

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MC82

ok, I didnt know that. Thanks.

well, i just have one last question, can my motherboard support SATA II technology? the normal SATA HDs just sold out on Newegg. So I need to know this before I make my order.

thanks.

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ming

should still work.. but you'd be running it at half the transfer rate.

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MC82

so i guess i would be better off with a PATA drive if what you say is true. Ok or i can find somewhere else to buy it.

thanks ming

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mightymo

Both of those drives in your original post are SATA ONE drives, not II. Although the one labeled SATA II says it's SATA II, it's not. It's a little misleading, they meant that it has SATA II features, such as command queueing. SATA II is not even out yet, because it works at a top speed of 300mbps, which is incredible.

Anyhow, get the second one that you thought was SATA II. NCQ (Native Command Queueing) along with SATA's speed will without a doubt be the best choice.

Shamus MacNoob

I love my SATA drives and SATA 2 is not the same as SATA if your motherboard can support SATA 2 then it will be clearly written on the box or in the manual.

Sata drives are great so they dont do the rated 150mbs I am sure ATA 133 drives do lol

I prefere the seagates they are quite , fast , and have a 5 year warrenty

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FishBoy

yo i have asus k8v se deluxe should be almost the same i have 2 sata slots i didn't see anything about sata 2 though all you need is a driver if you need to install windows on one of them, one of the tech. support ppl emailed me an attachement of the driver and that's all there is to it, but no i didnt see anything about sata 2 on my mobo

you can try HD Tune it's a small program (freeware) that shows you disk speed and stuff like that

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chastity

truth be told you will be better off getting SATA drives even though they don't do sustained speeds of 150MB/sec they are the future as more and more boards support them etc.

Mainframeguy

I have both in my new rig - there are ALWAYS a lot of fiddly parts to configuring a SATA drive, but there can be with large ATA drives too (and it was when I had to RMA a Seagate ATA 160GB that I ended up investing in a SATA drive!).

So you pays your money and takes your choices - but for me at the present moment I would NEVER choose to be without some HD capacity on an IDE channel as a backup for a tight spot.... That's just me, I am sure in some ways it is easier to commit whole heartedly to SATA from the outset...

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indyjones

I have two seagate baracudas SATA drives only. Just plugged them in and they ah.....worked never had a problem {touches wood}

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Bman

just make sure your motherboard supports SATA, if you end up getting that.

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RickyC

The transfer rate of SATA comes into play when you run two drives as a stripe. In theory you're doubling your HD performance.