PATA = ATA

[WeaponX 0]

Quick question. I just saw this advertised and want to get one. I see a 300GB PATA 16MB cache hard drive. Is PATA the same as ATA (IDE)? I just never saw the cache size being bigger than 8MB.

[yordan 10]

Are you sure it's PATA ? Isn't it rather SATA ?

[irwan6179 0]

yes, pata is equal to ata, meaning pata is the second name for ata.. but i also never heard about 16mb ata drive... i think maybe they got it now... just buy it, if it is pata, then ata system can accept it..

[WeaponX 0]

I had the same reaction like you two when I saw this. Thought they meant SATA since I never saw any cache higher than 8MB for ATA drives. But take a look at TigerDirect. Guess I can use that then

[kam1405241509 0]

yes, pata is equal to ata, meaning pata is the second name for ata.. but i also never heard about 16mb ata drive... i think maybe they got it now... just buy it, if it is pata, then ata system can accept it..

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The TigerDirect page says both "Parallel ATA-133" and "Ultra ATA-133".

 

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/ is a good page I just found explaining "PATA ... The EIDE interface, known retrospectively as Parallel ATA ... described as ATA133, Ultra DMA133, Ultra ATA133 or something similar. In this context, "ATA", "Ultra DMA" and "Ultra ATA" mean the same thing".

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ is another page I just found when trying to find a review of your next HDD. I could find a PATA version review, but the interface (SATA/PATA) isn't important to an HDD Review since a single HDD never reaches that max speed, and the only issue is SATA has NCQ sometimes, which can improve performance if implemented right .. in this case it make no difference & they give both the enabled/disable benches anyway! I don't like Maxtor since I've seen loads of them go belly up in my lab .. I prefer Seagate's track record (from independent user surveys like those on SR .. but that's another matter!!).

 

As you can see from that review/comparison, it does very well, only beaten by Raptors. And most of these desktop PATA/SATA HDDs are pretty much performing similarly in the overall worldbench scripts scores (http://techreport.com/review/7903/maxtor-diamondmax-10-hard-drive/9)! It doesn't do very well at the Windows boot time test (http://techreport.com/review/7903/maxtor-diamondmax-10-hard-drive/11) since the Raptors have the 10K/bandwidth advantage .. but the 7200.7's also beat the non-NCQ version of your next drive .. by quite a bit :-o. Still it's better than the really crappy v9 of the Maxtor which takes nearly twice as long as the top Raptor to load XP, Doom3, etc. Finally, in (http://techreport.com/review/7903/maxtor-diamondmax-10-hard-drive/12) you can see that noise & heat are OK too, relative to other similar priced drives.

 

Drives with 16MB caches have mainly aimed at multimedia/AV enthusiasts (there are many SCSI ones I've seen a while ago). More cache won't necessarily be the smartest/fastest thing to do. It depends on the app, the FS block size (should be good for big AV files where you set the block size to be pretty big .. this increases transfer efficiency but wastes space if there's lots of small files ... usually most files are small, so it's a compromise as with all things!) and the HDD algorithms (how much queue cache is available for NCQ isn't that important if the queue length itself is tiny .. but to improve this would require spending much much more on a pro setup!!).

 

Basically, if you're not doing AV work, and don't mind buying a cheap SATA PCI card (SATA is at 150MB/s max, but today HDDs are normally at about 55-65-90MB/s depending on if it's like your drive, a Raptor or a 15k drive!), it's probably best to get a SATA Raptor or two if you want max performance on a non-pro setup. If not, then this definitely looks like a good drive (other than my personal dislike of Maxtor and generally drives of limited warranties .. but perhaps I'm a bit paranoid after seeing so many crashes ;-)).

 

Thanks for pointing this out, BTW .. very interesting drive nonetheless!

[WeaponX 0]

Confused again Just to wrap this up, so PATA is similar to SATA and it's not ATA at all? That explains the 16MB cache

[kam1405241509 0]

Confused again  

 

Just to wrap this up, so PATA is similar to SATA and it's not ATA at all?  That explains the 16MB cache

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Hi WeaponX, sorry for the late reply again, and sorry for the long message previously .. one of my bad habits :-(.

 

OK, to sum up, PATA=ATA=old, SATA=new. But either is just fine to me, since as you can see in that review I posted, this drive is damn good & competes well with all the new SATA drives too. So to me there's not really an issue between choosing one or the other. I'd actually prefer PATA to use in older PCs, or SATA if you have a specific need for some feature.

 

PATA is actually ATA, and it's the older parallel interface that runs at upto 133MB/s.

SATA is the newer serial interface standards that run from 150MB/s upwards (SATAII is a little consuding to some extent since it's a lot of marketing just to state that the drive has certain features that improve how data gets read).

 

I think you can buy convertors to go between the two, since the protocol is still pretty much the same, just serial or parallel, and hence all the same software drivers pretty much work as is (unless you want to enable SATA/II specific features).

 

If you have any more questions please write them here, I'm sure there must be other people who are also confused, so your questions will hopefully make me write better answers :-). Also, I will reply no matter what the question, though I can sometimes go AWOL now and then due to work deadlines, sorry :-).