Anyone upgrade to the new Serial ATA HD's?
 

Putting together a new PC with the ASUS A7N8X DLX Mobo which supports the new HD Serial ATA drives and wondering if anyone has one of these yet and if you saw a noticeable speed difference vs the Ultra ATA drives and any compatibility issues at all?

Thnx

I bought a new PC a few months ago and got a serial ATA HD. It's good stuff. :thumbsup

Yeh, from what I've been reading they can push 150MB/sec.

Nice throughput.

This baby's gonna rock some kick ass speed.

Installing the new AMD "Barton Core" XP series CPU which you can clock out to 3.2ghz with a 400FSB. 54 Million Transistors on that little critter. Hard to imagine they can fit that many on there.

Also, bought Corsair 3200LL XMS Memory with Platinum heat sinks for it.

That's not accurate. Your CPU is probably a AMD 3200+ which has nothign to do with its actual clock-speed. (actual speed is 2.2ghz)

Also, you have no upgrade path. The next generation of AMDs (which is already out) is the AMD 64 bit cpu, and it will require a different motherboard.

I used to be a big AMD fan, but I dont recommend them for the time being. P4 are simply a better purchase right now.


http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/index.html


I do like and recommend the SATA interface. the theoritical speed is 150mb, but like ATA100, it doesnt push anywhere near its limit. But it does provide a nice increase in performance, its simpler to install, and its "futureproof"

Another good thing about serial ATA is that they've done away with those really wide ribbon cables that have been used forever to connect the HD to the motherboard. Serial ATA has a sleek cord and a small plug that is so much easier to work with, plus it helps air flow through your PC case much better than those huge ribbon cables which would clog up the inside of the case.

Serial ATA = :thumbsup

Hi,

I would definatley recommend SATA drives..

I'm currently using 2x120GB SATA Raid (7200 RPM / Seagate ST31200026AS) on Intel raid port and 2x20 GB ATA100 Raid (7200 RPM / Quantum FireballP AS2) on Promise raid port on my mainboard.

I can say SATA drives much faster, even in the single mode it was faster than the ATA100 Raid (I've tested them in single mode before setting up raid) with the HDD benchmark test of Sisoft Sandra..

I would be careful of the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe mobo. I put together two systems using this board because the specs on the board looked fantastic. I used AMD Athlon XP 2700+ processors on both systems (333mhz bus speed), and BOTH Systems has major problems. Both systems also had Kingston PC2700 memory.

Silly shit would happen, like when I would launch MS Word.. after about 20 seconds in a document, BAM.... system crash. This wasn't on one, but both machines. And aside from that, just general system crashes as well.

I researched this high and low, and it seemed to come down to a memory problem with Kingston memory and this particular ASUS board. So.... I replaced the Kingston with Crucial PC2700 memory, and SAME damn problems still kept occuring. I even went so far as to blow away the drive with the new memory installed and start from scratch -- no better success.

After agonizing, for the hell of it I decided to drop my memory frequency down in the bios from 333 to 266. Wouldn't you know, the damn system now ran stable -- no more crashes. But you feel kind of like you have a ferrari with a rev limiter on it now :(

Just my :2 cents: on that particular board. Some guys I've read have great success with these boards. But in my case two of the same system setups, different memory configs, etc... And nothing but problems when trying to run at max performance.

the drives are supposed to be much quieter too.

the platinum corsair is pimpin :thumbsup

could you use old ultra ata hd's with serial ata?

I know a few people have had technical issues, since its got so many advanced new features on it, but most don't from all the customer reviews I've read so far.

The Corsair Memory I got is certified to work from Asus. Kingston has had some probs with that board.

I have been buying rackmount supermicro servers with sata. Love the sata. The drives are hot swap in a quick mount tray. The cables are nice and thin so they don't block the airflow. And they're fast.

I don't know exactly how much faster in reality they are but I can tell you when I saw how fast those machines move a tear came to my eye.

Also I agree with Dr. Guile. I used to love AMD but now I won't touch their chips and I am back to Intel.

I got a raptor I love it ,going to add another to my system.

Ok.. do you honestly think.. if someone is talking about computer specifics they don't know what processor speed they're talking about?

nstalling the new AMD "Barton Core" XP series CPU .which you can clock out to 3.2ghz with a 400FSB. 54 Million Transistors on that little critter. Hard to imagine they can fit that many on there

pssh

Yeh really! :thumbsup

Yes, really....

that CPU will never, ever run at 3.2ghz.... unless you bath it in liquid nytrogen...