SATA vs IDE – Reliability and Multi-tasking

Question:

I am curious. I understand the speed, ease, price argument for SATA. I have not seen reliability compared, or what OS, CPU, and memory prerequisites there might be to support the transfer rates claimed by SATA.

I would also like to understand the expectation of using a disk for both reads and writes simultaneously. If my motherboard does not support SATA II, can I honestly expect to see 150MB per second transfer to my disk? I really miss IDE for reliability and multitasking. Is this just in my head?

Answer:

Hello,
Thanks for your question. It is an interesting point that you make. I have also heard that people find SATA more reliable then IDE, however I don’t think that this is a fact.

Considering that SATA is the standard for motherboards and hard drives, it seems unlikely that there would be a difference in reliability and multi-tasking. I have had no negative experiences with the SATA hard drives and transfer rates etc. but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Maybe some people could comment below and let us know what they think and their experience.

As far as prerequisites go, as far as I know, the only thing that you need is a SATA enabled motherboard with the appropriate slot and a SATA hard drive. After that the hard drive should perform with any Operating System.

Thanks for your question. Leave your possible thoughts below.
Cheers

Comments for SATA vs IDE – Reliability and Multi-tasking

Nov 10, 2010

I dont think SATA is reliable.

by: Hardy

I have Lenovo and DEll vostro. Lenovo is 3 yrs old with PATA and i just bought vostro with seagate momentus 7200.4.

I have to use Laptop roughly. I have to rush sometimes to somewhere and I dont shutdown.

Lenovo is working just perfectly great even after 3 yrs same way as new. it has hitachi.

Whereas yesterday my Dell crashed 99.99% cuz of i just didnt shutdown and i went off never turned back ON. dell had Boot failure cuz of bad sectors on disk.

Only reason i can think of is SATA has to be handled more carefully.

Aug 20, 2010

Cable reliablity

by: Keith Potter

I have actually found SATA drives to be extremely unreliable. It is not the drives themselves, but these awful cheap connectors. There are many manufacturers, and some are better than others, but so far there appears to be no way to tell what is good or not. It does not matter whether it has a spring retaining clip or not.

On most occasions malfunctioning drives are magically restored by buying a new cable.

My shop has serviced several hundreds of computers with this problem. So many people have lost one of the drives in a RAID0 array, and then destroyed all of their data in an attempt to recover it, when the cable on one of the drives was to blame.

Breaking open these connectors often reveals the insulation stripped back for 15mm inside the shell, and the wires shorting together.

If your computer fails to boot properly, or hangs halfway through the boot process, suspect the drive cables before doing anything else. The boot may have stalled as the computer cannot read one of the drives. Remove all cables except the boot drive. If that doesn’t restore operation change the cable.

May 16, 2010

IDE all the way!

by: Anonymous

Hello All,

Thanks Nathanael, I really appreciate the time you have taken to build this website and the useful information that you have provided.

In regards to SATA vs IDE, I prefer IDE. I have tried a number of SATA hard drives, but have only had trouble with them. They have crashed numerous times and have only caused issues. I think part of the problem is that the SATA cable seems to be able to fall out easier then the IDE cable.

So I have gone back to using the IDE hard drives and whether this is a good idea or not, I’m yet to discover, but for now my IDE hard drives are going strong.

Once again, Thankyou.

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