PDA

View Full Version : Hard drives PATA vs SATA , what's the diff.??

Igor
July 29th, 2006, 11:36 AM
Thinking of upgrading my laptop 100Gb drives to 160gb, but noticed they are marked as not IDE (as before) , but SATA and PATA... what's this? How about compatibility??
Swampy
July 29th, 2006, 11:47 AM
Thinking of upgrading my laptop 100Gb drives to 160gb, but noticed they are marked as not IDE (as before) , but SATA and PATA... what's this? How about compatibility??

PATA is Parallel ATA, to you, "IDE". Standard 40 pin connector on the back that you'd use a 40 or 80 wire cable on.

SATA is Serial ATA. It's the "new" IDE and is faster and the cables are very small, like 1/2 inch wide.

The connectors are much different as well.

I don't have the time or I'd look up pictures of what they look like, but you can probably do that as well. You'll probably want to stick with PATA drives unless your computer is newer than 1 1/2 years and you have a SATA controller on your motherboard. You can buy an aftermarket SATA controller to plug into the motherboard though.

You can get external USB cases that handle SATA drives as well and it won't matter if you have SATA on your motherboard or not as it will be an IDE device. :)

Hope this helps.
Igor
July 29th, 2006, 11:56 AM
Thanks Bryan. My Toshiba S705 is old, so looks like I'll need the PATA drives.
Tom V
July 29th, 2006, 08:03 PM
I put a SATA drive controller card in my Mac's PCI slot, and have attached two internal SATA drives to it. They're said to be fast, and they seem fast. I use one to keep all my client work on. It gets shared across my little gigabit ethernet network. Having the smaller cables in the computer case does not hinder ventilation the way a PATA drive's wide ribbon cable would.
Rockyw
July 30th, 2006, 03:29 AM
Most new motherboards have SATA. Swampy was correct on the definition of PATA Vs SATA. The image below is a SATA cable and they are great for running the cables compared to the old ribbon cables and they are faster. If it's an older computer it probably only has PATA drives. The newer boards have PATA and SATA hookups on many boards. There are SATA I and SATA II hard drives also. The SATA IIs are only faster if ran as a RAID setup.
PS: The image came from a site that has all kinds of SATA cables with connectors that are 90s and straight in many lengths. It really lets you run the cables neat and organized.
http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-cables.html
http://www.satacables.com/