[gloco]

Seriously, it's pissing me off. Last night my pc went beserk after i ran McAfee on my entire machine. It froze up after the sweep found no viruses, upon rebooting it would stall at the xp splash screen. After a few reboots i got the safe mode prompt and jumped into it and selected xp to perform a system restore and it seemed to work. Then today my E drive vanished! What! So i spent the last hour cursing about how much i hate SATA HD's while fiddling with my pc then figuring it's gotta be hardware related. So i popped the hood...swapped the sata for the HD in question into a free sata port and rebooted. Voila, it worked. Funny thing is that my pc acted as if i just installed my mouse and keyboard (both usb devices) for the first time. What? This pc has a mind of it's own...

note: when i first got this pc built my E drive would constantly disappear, even after the machine booted up and it was there, upon trying to open a program that was stored on that disk, i would get a error that the program is not found and i would check and find the drive would go missing. A reboot would solve it, but it was occuring frequently for the first few weeks before it stopped.

So, what this comes down to is...next pc i buy i'm getting scsi drives. To hell with SATA.

 

[Mr.Radar]

I agree that SATA is a PITA. My big gripe with it is that unlike IDE it requires special drivers to work. I really like the small cable though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gloco So, what this comes down to is...next pc i buy i'm getting scsi drives. To hell with SATA.

Why not just get IDE? They're cheaper than SCSI and unless you get server-level hard drives the speed difference really isn't all that big.

 

[Stephonovich]

SATA is still in it's infancy. Some mobos work better than others with it. As much as I hate to admit it, Intel's work marvellously with SATA. I know a guy who's built at least 5 balls-out gaming machines using SATA HDs and various Intel mobos, and has never had a problem with them.

 

[The_Mac]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr.Radar I agree that SATA is a PITA. My big gripe with it is that unlike IDE it requires special drivers to work. I really like the small cable though. Why not just get IDE? They're cheaper than SCSI and unless you get server-level hard drives the speed difference really isn't all that big.

The only boards that require drivers to work with SATA are older chipsets that don't have native SATA support. Any recent generation or last generation chipset should have native support.

Also, there are a couple nice features on the horizon that should appear in the 2.0 spec, and that are currently available on some 1.0 gear. Things like Native Command Queueing (HUGE SPEED BOOST), hot swappability, locking connectors, etc...

It's a better thought out interface than PATA, and the only reason that it was having issues for the original poster was a faulty part, not because it's an inherently worse spec. Honestly, it could have happened with a PATA controller, USB, PCI, anything. It's a buggy motherboard, and you should just RMA it.

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Mac Also, there are a couple nice features on the horizon that should appear in the 2.0 spec, and that are currently available on some 1.0 gear. Things like Native Command Queueing (HUGE SPEED BOOST), hot swappability, locking connectors, etc...

Hot swappable drives, eh? Can we say cheap home servers? Not that drives fail all that often, but it's nice when you need it.

 

[lan]

Funny because we have nearly the same system. I use IS7 and WD Raptor 74GB and have no problems. Pretty much I stick to intel and their chipsets.

Funny but I went from SCSI to IDE+SATA to reduce noise and get some performance increase. The writting speed of SCSI in WinXP is wack.

 

[GokieKS]

On both my i875P board (IC7-G) and nForce 3 Ultra board (K8N Neo2 Plat.), SATA works fine. Though it took me a while to figure out on the NF3 that you need to use SATA ports 3/4 if you're overclocking... upping the HTT screws up the SATA bus for ports 1/2 real bad.

~KS

 

[wallijonn]

Gloco,

What type of motherboard do you have? I stay away from VIA, SIS, and Promise chipsets.

And if I ever use SATA I will tie down the cables as a slight jar may cause problems. This is what I suspect your problem was.

 

[gloco]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wallijonn Gloco, What type of motherboard do you have? I stay away from VIA, SIS, and Promise chipsets. And if I ever use SATA I will tie down the cables as a slight jar may cause problems. This is what I suspect your problem was.

Wallijohn, i think it's a Intel 875P from Abit (model# IC7-G). I think it may have been a loose cable too, i doubt the sata connector on the mobo was damaged, but i decided to try a free sata port instead. Seems to have solved the problem regardless by popping the case open.

Thanks to everyone for the responses. Maybe IDE will instead be in the future since it is more affordable.

 

[wallijonn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gloco Maybe IDE will instead be in the future since it is more affordable.

If I jump on SATA it will have to be for a WD Raptor. I just picked up a 160GB Seagate for $50 after rebates and last week there was a sale on 200GB Seagates for $75 after rebates. At those prices it'll be a long while before I switch over to SATA. I'm still waiting for WD Raptors to come down in price; I can't justify paying $175 for a 74GB HD.

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wallijonn If I jump on SATA it will have to be for a WD Raptor. I just picked up a 160GB Seagate for $50 after rebates and last week there was a sale on 200GB Seagates for $75 after rebates. At those prices it'll be a long while before I switch over to SATA. I'm still waiting for WD Raptors to come down in price; I can't justify paying $175 for a 74GB HD.

Where'd you get such a deal? I paid $70 or so (I think... might have been $60 before tax) for a 160GB Seagate at BestBuy. But a 200GB for $75? Man, that's sweet.

 

[jpr703]

Raptors look nice on paper, but real world performance isn't much ahead of other quality SATA drives at all. Unless you're running some sort of special software that really utilizes their quick seeks time (lots of small, short reads in a row) than you probablly won't notice a difference at all.

I've been using Seagate SATA drives on newer mobos and haven't had any problem at all. Performance is quite nice and the cables are a whole lot easier to work with.

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpr703 Raptors look nice on paper, but real world performance isn't much ahead of other quality SATA drives at all. Unless you're running some sort of special software that really utilizes their quick seeks time (lots of small, short reads in a row) than you probablly won't notice a difference at all. I've been using Seagate SATA drives on newer mobos and haven't had any problem at all. Performance is quite nice and the cables are a whole lot easier to work with.

I'll give you that they're way overpriced, but man, they do give you a massive boost in gaming. A guy I know has 5 or 6 (he keeps getting more - was about that last I checked) gaming machines, all with P4 2.4-3.0GHz CPUs, 2GB RAM, and varying graphics card. He built one all out, with dual Raptors in RAID 0, and that thing loaded UT2K4 maps twice as fast as the others. It was insane. Worth it? No, but he had money to blow, and liked having toys.

 

[GokieKS]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpr703 Raptors look nice on paper, but real world performance isn't much ahead of other quality SATA drives at all. Unless you're running some sort of special software that really utilizes their quick seeks time (lots of small, short reads in a row) than you probablly won't notice a difference at all. I've been using Seagate SATA drives on newer mobos and haven't had any problem at all. Performance is quite nice and the cables are a whole lot easier to work with.

The Raptor does have it's uses... Windows bootup, especially, is *much* faster on a Raptor, even compared to two IDE drives (WD800JBs) in RAID-0. On my A64 system, you only see the Windows XP startup bar go across once.

My main problem with the Raptors is the noise... the Maxtor MaXLine III/DiamondMax 10 are better in that regard (not to mention being much better values), but still louder than I'd like...

~KS

 

[bg4533]

I have been using SATA for 2 years now with WD Raptors. Originally in a RAID 0 array, but I decided I would benefit using them as boot/ application drives in seperate computers more. So far I have had no problems with Windows XP. Linux was impossible to get working in the beginning though.