Is Ultra-ATA compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or compatible with Serial-ATA ?

As the subject alerady said I want to know if
Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or compatible with Serial-ATA ?

If Serial-ATA is the answer: Is Ultra-ATA better or worse then (Serial)-ATA ?

Oliver

Oliver Boswell wrote:
> As the subject alerady said I want to know if
> Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or
> compatible with Serial-ATA ?
>
> If Serial-ATA is the answer: Is Ultra-ATA better or worse then
> (Serial)-ATA ?

Go with SATA.
SATA is the standard now.

The cables are different (as is the protocol/drives/etc..) for the three you
mentioned - although you *could* use regular 40 wire cables with
UltraATA/ATA... You lose out and are not actually getting everything you
could out of it.

Of course - there are SATA/SATA2 drives out there - and in order to utilize
their full functionality - all things muct be ready to do so in the chain of
hardware (drive, cable, connection to motherboard...)

SATA is faster... SATA2 even more so. None of that matters if the drive
access is not your bottleneck in your current system.

--
Shenan Stanley
MS-MVP
--
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

"Go with" ?????

This is a laptop forum. You don't have a choice of which to "go with"
on any given laptop. The laptop's designers made the "go with" decision
and you are stuck with it, because parallel ATA (IDE/ATA/UATA) is
incompatible with serial ATA (SATA).


Shenan Stanley wrote:

> Oliver Boswell wrote:
>
>>As the subject alerady said I want to know if
>>Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or
>>compatible with Serial-ATA ?
>>
>>If Serial-ATA is the answer: Is Ultra-ATA better or worse then
>>(Serial)-ATA ?
>
>
> Go with SATA.
> SATA is the standard now.
>
> The cables are different (as is the protocol/drives/etc..) for the three you
> mentioned - although you *could* use regular 40 wire cables with
> UltraATA/ATA... You lose out and are not actually getting everything you
> could out of it.
>
> Of course - there are SATA/SATA2 drives out there - and in order to utilize
> their full functionality - all things muct be ready to do so in the chain of
> hardware (drive, cable, connection to motherboard...)
>
> SATA is faster... SATA2 even more so. None of that matters if the drive
> access is not your bottleneck in your current system.
>

Shenan Stanley wrote:
>
> Oliver Boswell wrote:
> > As the subject alerady said I want to know if
> > Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or
> > compatible with Serial-ATA ?
> >
> > If Serial-ATA is the answer: Is Ultra-ATA better or worse then
> > (Serial)-ATA ?
>
> Go with SATA.
> SATA is the standard now.
>
> The cables are different (as is the protocol/drives/etc..) for the three you
> mentioned - although you *could* use regular 40 wire cables with
> UltraATA/ATA... You lose out and are not actually getting everything you
> could out of it.
>
> Of course - there are SATA/SATA2 drives out there - and in order to utilize
> their full functionality - all things muct be ready to do so in the chain of
> hardware (drive, cable, connection to motherboard...)
>
> SATA is faster... SATA2 even more so. None of that matters if the drive
> access is not your bottleneck in your current system.


Not in my experience, it's not. Actually, there's little difference in
real-world speed between ATA66 and SATA-300, although you can get more
powerful controllers (Areca) for the latter, which *do* make a
difference.

And I think any system more powerful than a P3 1GHz is going to be
bottlenecked at the hard drive I/O. In other words, the vast majority
of systems out there today.

But that's just my take on the issue.



Odie
--
Retrodata
www.retrodata.co.uk
Globally Local Data Recovery Experts

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Odie Ferrous <> wrote:
> Shenan Stanley wrote:
>>
>> Oliver Boswell wrote:
>> > As the subject alerady said I want to know if
>> > Ultra-ATA (for hard discs) is compatible with (simple) ATA/IDE or
>> > compatible with Serial-ATA ?
>> >
>> > If Serial-ATA is the answer: Is Ultra-ATA better or worse then
>> > (Serial)-ATA ?
>>
>> Go with SATA.
>> SATA is the standard now.
>>
>> The cables are different (as is the protocol/drives/etc..) for the three you
>> mentioned - although you *could* use regular 40 wire cables with
>> UltraATA/ATA... You lose out and are not actually getting everything you
>> could out of it.
>>
>> Of course - there are SATA/SATA2 drives out there - and in order to utilize
>> their full functionality - all things muct be ready to do so in the chain of
>> hardware (drive, cable, connection to motherboard...)
>>
>> SATA is faster... SATA2 even more so. None of that matters if the drive
>> access is not your bottleneck in your current system.
>

> Not in my experience, it's not. Actually, there's little difference in
> real-world speed between ATA66 and SATA-300, although you can get more
> powerful controllers (Areca) for the latter, which *do* make a
> difference.

> And I think any system more powerful than a P3 1GHz is going to be
> bottlenecked at the hard drive I/O. In other words, the vast majority
> of systems out there today.

> But that's just my take on the issue.

I have a pair of Samsungs which are identical, except for the
interface. One is ATA100, one SATA. No speed differencfe noticeable.
I agree that a P3@1GHz should be able to saturate most current 7200
rpm disks in some applications. And of course if you have two disks
on an ATA bus, some modern disks already can deliver a bit more data
than ATA133 can transport, which gives SATA an edge in some
situations. But keep in mind that PCI has a theroetical upper
speed limit of 135MB/s and a practical limit on a slower chipset
more like 70-80MB/s or so.

Arno

Arno Wagner wrote:

> I have a pair of Samsungs which are identical, except for the
> interface. One is ATA100, one SATA. No speed differencfe noticeable.
> I agree that a P3@1GHz should be able to saturate most current 7200
> rpm disks in some applications. And of course if you have two disks
> on an ATA bus, some modern disks already can deliver a bit more data
> than ATA133 can transport, which gives SATA an edge in some
> situations. But keep in mind that PCI has a theroetical upper
> speed limit of 135MB/s and a practical limit on a slower chipset
> more like 70-80MB/s or so.

In practice, the cache hits in the L2 cache, and in the system memory
used for cache, make the difference theoretical, except in applications
where there would be both few cache hits, and a need for the higher data
rates. Such applications aren't that rare any more, such as non-linear
video editing.

Forget about PCI's bandwidth, as PCI Express is what is used in the
latest systems.