[tavilach]

I'm a little confused about which type of HD I should be getting with this enclosure:

http://www.triumphtech.com/@PRDCT/TT736.htm

SATA? ATA100?

I have a hard drive with this same enclosure already, and all I know about it is the following:

HD 250G|ST 7K 8M ATA100 ST3250823A

And that works fine.

But if a SATA would work with the enclosure, I assume I should get that? I'm not sure which is better, or what is compatible with what I have.

Thanks...I know, I'm totally clueless.

[bowwowman]

the lowdown on ATA terminology:

ATA Bus Description, with IDE Pin Out with Signal Names

the enclosure you linked to says it supports ATA-7, which is the Ultra ATA/133 spec, so thats the type of drive you would need to get. ATA 100/66/33 are all backwards compatible, so if you get another ATA/100 drive like the 250GB one you listed, it will work fine too

[tavilach]

Damn, I see that SATA's can be over twice as fast.

Does it actually end up being twice as fast, or this there really no difference for a 7200 RPM drive?

If so, I'd want to return the enclosure I ordered and get a SATA enclosure (I found a nice one on Newegg) and a SATA drive...

If not, perhaps its a good investment to get a SATA enclosure + drive now, so that I can use the enclosure in the future when the RPM of a future SATA drive makes having SATA worthwhile?

[tavilach]

Anyone?

[mduell]

With drives that can push 50-80MBps, does it matter if your bus is 100MBps or 300MBps? Not much. SATA has some other features to improve performance in some situations (like NCQ), but the big advantage is smaller cabling/connectors and external possibilities (eSATA).

[bowwowman]

2x as fast is a theoretical best under ideal conditions and with top flight equipment all around. However, I can tell you that on my current QS & my old Sawtooth and my old B&W, having SATA drives (internally) does significantly speed up overall system operations like booting, app launching, window resizing, and file movement/saving/deletion.

Of course my situation is/was with having (all 3 machines) being maxed on ram, best available video cards, and seperate SATA drives (10K Raptors) for OS X and application swap files........

So yes it can make a difference in most systems, the degree just depends on which machine/set-up you have. In this case, having a SATA drive in an enclosure that connects to your computer with FW400 and/or USB 2 will pretty much ensure that the bus will be kept reasonably full of data most of the time, which is a good thing

But, as with all things 'puter related, YMMV !

[Cadaver]

What kind of computer are you connecting this drive to? Unless you've got access to an eSATA connector, don't bother with the SATA drives.

An external case that uses SATA drives, but is connected to a non-SATA port on a computer (i.e., USB or FireWire) has to do two things -

First, it has to convert the SATA data to PATA (standard ATA/100 or ATA/133). Then, it must do the ATA to FireWire or USB conversion. AFAIK, there are no straight SATA-to-FireWire converters. I think they all pass through the SATA to PATA step, then on to the FireWire or USB translation, even if all done internally on the same chip.

This two-step conversion will probably kill any speed advantage a single-drive SATA-FireWire system would have over a PATA-FireWire system.

If you're talking pure speed in multidrive enclosures, then eSATA would be the way to go. And I mean straight eSATA - no conversion to another data transfer protocol like USB or FireWire.

For you, I think a simple, inexpensive PATA to FireWire/USB case will suit you just fine.