Serial ATA

Hello, just a quick question. About 4 months ago I moved from a regular IDE Maxtor HD (80GB) 7200 Rpm to a Serial ATA Maxtor (80GB). This new drive moves a lot faster than the other one; probably 40-50% faster. But my question: is this Serial ATA Drive faster in terms of Rpms or is it just the interface what makes it faster. I heard someone say that SATA moves at 10000 Rpms. Is that true? I'm asking because I saw a SATA HD just like mine at newegg, but it said 7200 Rpm. So what's the deal with the speeds ?

Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks

 

SATA drives are pretty much identical to regular IDE drives except the transfer speeds are *much* faster. The data transfer speeds on SATA drives is currently limited to the access speed of the HDD much more than the transfer speed of the buss.

 

Also, additional cache can be a big help. Like, if the IDE has 2MB of cache and the new one has 8MB. Also, I've found that a newer hard drive tends to run a little faster as well.

There is only one SATA hard drive that moves @ 10,000RPM, and that's the Western Digital Raptor. WD can do this mainly because they no longer have any SCSI drives, like Maxtor and Seagate do. Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu, and Hitachi (formerly IBM's HDD section) have 15,000RPM SCSI drives, btw.

 

whilst on the subject of sata drives, i have 2 160gb maxtor sata 150 drives.. but are just used as storage atm, my shity 60gb 7200rpm ata100 2mb excelsor will not boot fully boot into windows.. luckily i have a backup of everything on my 2nd 160gb maxtor..

i'd like to setup my spare 160gb maxtor as my boot drive.. problem is i don't have the cd that came with it..(as i didn't receive one)

the only way to create a partition i can see is to use FDISK but when i create a partition it always comes out as:2.5gb parition not the full 160gb..

can someone please tell me how to go about installing XP PRO on this drive.. maxtors website is fucking useless!

 

Fdisk is ancient, at least the version that MS uses. You may as well forget about that. Instead, I recommend just using the NT5.1 (XP) Installer. It will allow you to partition and format your drive(s) for the purpose of installation. It doesn't give you many options per se, but I think it'll do what you want it to do.

 

i can get into the XP msdos setup menu but when it is loading the bootup floppies after the 6th disk it says no disk drive can be detected..

ie its not recognising my sata drive as the boot disk.. or at all..

and yes i have loaded my third party (F6) sata controller driver, and it is also recognised in windows XP as a slave drive.. and i can use it perfectly..

just trying to install XP Pro is not working.. as it wont recognise the drive..

can someone please explain thoroughly how to do it? and get it working..?

 

First of all, if you don't mind, why are you using the XP boot floppies rather than booting from the CD? Is the CD a burned copy (i.e. downloaded from P2P), which isn't bootable? Is your BIOS not configured to boot from CD first? You should really get it worked out so you can boot from CD if possible.

 

yep cd is a burned copy of the net, (P2P) it isn't bootable.. although i do own a legit CDKEY, unfortunately i never used to keep my cd's organised, just scattered around the place.

 

If you legitimately own it, you can throw the contents of the CD onto a HDD, then re-burn them as a bootable CD using many popular burner programs. For instance, Nero Burning ROM. If you don't own it legitimately, you can still do what I suggested, we just can't really support you here.

 

i do own it legitimately but i dont have a working IDE HDD and burner all my other drives have dvd-roms : /

need 2 get the sata working, what im most likely going to do is pop round a friends and borrow his XP Pro cd (non sp1) install from that, then update it using my cdkey to SP1..

 

Ok, I see. So my HD is just 7200 Rpm, but the SATA interface is what makes the difference here. Ok then, I'm still very happy with it. Thanks for sharing your ideas guys.