The Main Difference Between SATA and IDE Hard Disk Drives

Until lately, it had been common for computer systems to become outfitted by having an IDE hard disk. Nowadays most computer systems, including laptops, will probably make use of the more recent SATA hard disk drives. If you are unclear about the main difference, here's what you ought to know:

Performance That one of the most basic good reasons to make certain you receive a computer having a SATA harddrive. IDE is a lot reduced than SATA. The quickest IDE drive, with a bandwith speed of 133MB/s is reduced than the usual standard SATA drive, with a transfer rate of 150MB/s. Actually more recent SATA II drives have bending that to 300MB/s.

As the amounts might not mean much, you will observe a large speed increase when utilizing SATA. This is also true if you use large video, seem or graphics files.

Capacity With SATA you are able to store much more information. IDE harddrives normally have an optimum storage of 500MB. Current SATA drives holds 2TB, that's four occasions around an IDE.

Cables Physically, you might not notice an excessive amount of distinction between the drives. However, the connections used are extremely different.

IDE utilizes a ribbon cable. This can be a flat gray cable which has a connector with 40pins.

SATA, however, includes a much more compact 7pin cable that's typically red-colored colored.

Jumpers Inside a computer, you have several harddrive. For connecting multiple IDE drives, you have to chain the ribbon cables in one to another. The pc system has no clue the primary drive, by which to load the operating-system. Because of this, IDE drives possess a 'jumper' pin. The positioning of the pin determines if it's a 'master' or perhaps a 'slave'.

SATA drives avoid using jumpers. Each drive connects straight to the system board. To create the main drive, you have access to the configurations in the computer systems BIOS (special software that runs when you begin the pc).

You will find other variations, however these ones the thing is listed here are the primary variations between SATA and IDE harddrives.