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megasad · Apr 10, 2006, 05:39 PM

The title pretty much says it all.

I want to get an external 500GB hard drive. Is there any advantage to using a SATA drive rather than a PATA one when connecting it to my computer via regular old FireWire (400Mbps)?

I already have a spare PATA enclosure, would need to buy a SATA one, but the drives themselves are all pretty much the same price.

Any thoughts?

mduell · Apr 10, 2006, 05:53 PM

FW400 will be the big bottleneck, so there isn't really any difference.

edit: After looking at the price of PATA vs SATA drives, you may come out ahead buying a new enclosure and SATA drive. $44 more for a 500GB PATA ($314, Maxtor) drive than SATA ($270, Seagate) drive, while most enclosures are $40ish and you could sell your old enclosure.
If you're going to reuse the drive in another system in the future (since it is a pretty big/new capacity), it's more likely to have SATA than PATA.

ghporter · Apr 10, 2006, 06:06 PM

I'd go with the SATA. As mduell says, they are more than competitively priced, the disk's throughput is significantly faster than very large PATA drives (which often go no faster than ATA 100), and you may eventually wind up upgrading to a machine that allows you to natively connect an SATA drive directly (the SATA standard allows for this; it's supposedly even hot-swapable in some cases).

mduell · Apr 10, 2006, 06:19 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

the disk's throughput is significantly faster than very large PATA drives (which often go no faster than ATA 100)

Even the fastest 10kRPM ATA drives are only in the high 80s, so ATA/100 or 133 is fast enough for now. But since they're falling out of fashion, the disks are more expensive.

I use external SATA and it flies... also, the enclosures are dirt cheap since they're just bridging SATA-SATA.

megasad · Apr 10, 2006, 06:26 PM

Since SATA seems to be in the lead, does this drive seem good to you all?

I've never bought Maxtor before, mostly Seagate plus one Hitachi and one Samsung. They are reliable?

And does anyone know of any SATA enclosures that can be bought in England and don't look like poo?

megasad · Apr 11, 2006, 05:18 AM

Also also, has anyone used this enclosure? Or know of a better (for me that means plastic) one?

SpaceMonkey · Apr 12, 2006, 10:28 AM

Originally Posted by mduell

Even the fastest 10kRPM ATA drives are only in the high 80s, so ATA/100 or 133 is fast enough for now. But since they're falling out of fashion, the disks are more expensive.

I use external SATA and it flies... also, the enclosures are dirt cheap since they're just bridging SATA-SATA.

megasad would need an eSATA card first, though...

megasad · Apr 12, 2006, 12:05 PM

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey

megasad would need an eSATA card first, though...

And in an eMac, iBook and iMac, that's a pretty tricky thing to do!

mduell · Apr 12, 2006, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey

megasad would need an eSATA card first, though...

Yes, and that was the premise of ghporter's comment I was replying to: "you may eventually wind up upgrading to a machine that allows you to natively connect an SATA drive directly"

For now megasad will have to use Firewire.

megasad · Apr 14, 2006, 08:25 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

For now megasad will have to use Firewire.

Sad Panda... I've been looking for SATA enclosures for the last few days, both on the interweb and in real life shops too, and all the ones I've found have been both expensive (£35-£50) and/or nasty quality. That one I linked to above won't even boot a Mac, so is useless to me.

So, since I've already got the PATA enclosure, I reckon I go with this drive instead. Is only £1.61 more expensive!

Dagnammit... All I want is for LaCie to make a FireWire version of their Brick drive. I emailed them, but they said they had no plans to do so. Oh well.