Reader Ian Holland wrote after reading one of my Special Edition Newsletters, which sometimes go to email subscribers:
Hi Terry,
Just read your VERY absorbing newsletter, I have a ( moronic??) question about those SATA hard drives.
I recently ( 2006) built 5 pcs for the office ALL with SATA drives, and they are all the same spec as this one at home with regards to RAM ( 2gb) and processors ( all Pentium 4, 3.5GHz) . So, to all intents and purposes they should be more or less the same ( all ASUS mother boards the same make and type, all with the same version of XP Pro Corp) –except the ones at the office are all on a network to ADSL (yukk!) this one is on a small home network (4pc’s) to cable broadband ( much better!).
The pcs at the office with minimal data installed are all far, far slower at moving files, searching, transferring data ( I ran a comparison with the same 36,588 images / 2.94 Gbytes) and also with downloading, than the one here on IDE at home.
I also get many more sudden “blue screens” ( “windows has shut down to prevent damage to the system….”) at the office machines, usually when running, e.g. three video editing programs, Nero 7 DVD burning, + maybe four large downloads and some word processing all simultaneously-
-at home I NEVER managed to get these messages at all, however hard I work the processor / RAM.
My question ( as an ignoramus!) is this;-
What is the purpose and advantages ( if any!) of going to SATA drives when they are patently less reliable, and lower performance than the “old” IDE ones? It seems to be yet another marketing ploy for us to shell out more money again.
I seek real elucidation here….
Thanks for an ever-improving newsletter, Ian.
Ian,
SATA (Serial ATA) is actually capable of much faster communication than is the PATA (Parallel ATA) interface.
The fact that you’re seeing significantly faster performance on one machine than on the other 4. Despite the 4 being on an office network, they should not be markedly slower than the home machine.
Here are some fo the things that come to mind:
