SATA drives...worth it?

At the beginning of this recipe, I said I've uncovered significant under-performance in IDE technology, given the prices that retail stores charge for new PCs. In this section, I'll prove it. First, I will describe a "head to head" performance comparison between three systems, one older PC newly configured with a SATA drive, and two new PCs, both with new IDE drives.

The Old PC is my trusty, four-year-old Compaq Presario 5WV254. This system contains an AMD Duron 700 MHz CPU and 512 MB of RAM, and the OS is Windows XP Professional. For this recipe, I upgraded the system with a Maxtor 6Y120 SATA hard drive.

New PC #1 is a Compaq Presario Pentium 4 system. It boasts a 3.0 GHZ Pentium 4 CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and Windows XP Professional. Storage is provided by a 7200-RPM IDE hard drive.

New PC #2 is Compaq Presario SR1100NX. It boasts a 2.53 GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and Windows XP Professional. The hard drive is a 5400-RPM Seagate Barracuda ST340015A.

You might be forgiven if you expected the new PC to run much faster than my old one. After all, it has a much faster CPU, right? Well, let's take a look.

Test 1

The first test I ran was a generic file transfer. To keep everything "apples to apples," I took the system folder of Windows XP called c: > windows > system32. On any given system running Windows XP, this folder will contain about 330 MB contained in approximately 2,000 files. I created a new folder on the c: drive, then opened a DOS window to issue the manual command copy > c: > windows system32 > *.* which any old-timer knows will copy all the files from the windows > system32 folder to the new folder. Here are the surprising -- and astounding -- results.

PC
Disk type
Time to Transfer


New system #1
IDE
127 seconds



New system #2
IDE
151 seconds



Old system
SATA
44 seconds (!)







Test 2

Next, I performed what I refer to as my "time to boot" test. This test measures the time it takes to boot Windows XP from the opening banner to the initial display of the desktop.

PC
Disk type
Time to XP Boot


New system #1
IDE
28 seconds



New system #2
IDE
28 seconds



Old system
SATA
17 seconds (!)







Note: Due to the "bold assertions" of this recipe (test 2 in particular), it is incumbent upon me to make the following disclaimer: Given that there are different hard-drive manufacturers offering different performance levels, the performance differential I uncovered may be different from the differential given two other hard drives or two other PCs. Furthermore, there are new hard-drive controllers (for example, the Intel 925) that may shrink the performance differential between PCs with IDE and SATA hard drives.