Aristo

Hi gangs,

My nforce4 board is coming soon and I'm wondering is there any particular reason to upgrade my hdd from PATA to SATA other than less wires to mess with so better airflow? I also heard that it's a pain in the neck to install WinXP in SATA and floppy drive is required (do they still sell floppy?). Is there other way around other than loading the driver from floppy, such as streamline driver with XP or perhaps load the drivers from the USB pen drive? TIA.

Daversinger

if you do it right from the start, it will take you less hassle and or time to install XP. thats what i've heard in other threads

AlpineJay

I had to resort to buying a FDD to install Windows XP on my SATA drive. I tried burning the drivers at the root of the CD-ROM, and USB drives to no avail. You can probably slipstream drivers onto the WinXP disc (actually - I know you can) but I was unsuccessful in working nLite to do that. Out of frustration I just forked over the 15 bucks and got the job done in the quickest way.

Good luck though - SATA does offer some speed advantages, especially the drives that offer command queuing. For example, the Raptors are excellent OS/apps drives - for storage you'll be fine with PATA for now.

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shocky123

If you want numbers, here are some generic ones that are somewhat accurate, yet off the top of my head:

SATA-I with NCQ(command queing) offers max burst of 150MB/s
PATA offers up to 133MB/s (though I've never seen anywhere near this in my life)
SATA-II with NCQ and another queing scheme will offer up to 300MB/s (theoretically)
though i doubt drives will front that by its release date

PATA - uber easy to install, built in support for all OS (i believe)
SATA - easy to install if you __follow the instructions!__ has no native Linux support, but supported in most dev OS's. (however Linux2.4.27+ @ 2.6.x all have SATA support to an extent) --- if you wanna know about the (lackof) Linux support I'd LOVE to tell you of my adventures at work. *spits in disgust* *spits on Micro$haft* *spits on them again* *****ers*

but yeah, SATA has great potential, however, if you manage to get a PATA to get to 133MB/s, 1. let me know, 2. go with it, you're doing great!

lol, all in all, SATA is better, and allows for hot-swappable drives, however if you dont need that, go with PATA for now, no need to upgrade.

good luck

~Kyle

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