IDE/ATA vs. SATA ?? Does it really matter ?

Hello,

I know the interface specification calls for SATA to be slightly faster than the fastest IDE spec. HOWEVER, when used in practice with multi-tracked DAW software does it really matter much? Even with the SATA-2 spec (which is more than twice as fast as IDE) ?

I am skeptical of any significant difference between IDE and SATA1/2 in multi-tracking DAW software because of the seek time factor. I suspect if somebody is trying to play back enough tracks (say 50 tracks or more), eventually it will be the seek time, rather than conceptual throughput of the interface, that will become the obstacle. Correct ??

Sonic

The question wasn't from a cost savings perspective relative to different drive types, rather I was contemplating adding a faster CPU and more memory to my current machine for now rather than buying a whole new DAW (that I can't afford right now on the heels of a Sonar upgrade). But then it occured to me the current drives (which are the highest speed ATA) may also be considerably slower than modern day SATA2/3 drives. However, upon re-thinking things.....and knowing what I do about internal drive and Windows architecture (at least up until the time right before SATA first surfaced) I'm reluctant to believe there's much beyond single digit percentages of actual performance improvements in a streaming DAW context. Sure, there's tagged queuing and cache managment, but the latter is already in place within ATA drives and it's unlikely it differs much in SATA drives. If there are many physically fragmented sectors-streams then some other factors come into play to a small degree but that's not usually the case with streaming DAW I/O. I'll have to look into this further to get more caught up on the internals of SATA ... I will mention that I recently read a few actual real-life performance reviews on different disk drives, and on the Windows OS there were cases where ATA outperformed SATA. And the differences otherwise were so small they weren't worth worrying about. However, some of those articles I read were probably 2-3 years old if I recall so they may have been comparing SATA1.

Sonic

Here's a response from someone who really looks at all this from a very high level. I'm usually satisfied that the drives even spin at all.

I recently changed from IDE to SATA and honestly, I didn't notice a difference in performance at all. I have two physical drives and can run large projects from either drive (I just do multi-track audio - no MIDI or samples or anything like that). I was able to run upwards of a hundred tracks of audio on my old IDE drives just fine. I never ran any benchmarks to see if there was an improvement beyond that - there very well may have been and perhaps I am just blind to the little extra improvement. We always seem to be wanting to squeeze every last drop of performance out of our systems. Go with SATA for no other reason than it can't be any worse than IDE I suspect your ability to see a difference is based on what and how you do things.

I like SATA for another reason - they are easier to hook up. Gone are those bulky IDE cables and power supply cables. The inside of your 'puter looks a lot cleaner.

btw - that AHCI mode thing - isn't that dependent on the operating system? Does WinXP even support that mode of operation?

btw - that AHCI mode thing - isn't that dependent on the operating system? Does WinXP even support that mode of operation?

The drive controller has to support it (there'll be a SATA mode setting in the BIOS), and you have to load the AHCI drivers when you load XP.