Hack 61 Kick It Up a Notch with Serial ATA / PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

Disk drives using the new Serial ATA (SATA) data interface could deliver data throughput performance enhancements 12%, 125%, and even 350% higher than today's fastest UltraIDE-133 disk drives. We won't see these phenomenal (+125-350%) improvements as long as SATA interfaces on the system board continue to use the lagging PCI bus, but some motherboards with built-in SATA interfaces provide an alternative bus for higher performance. You can get that extra 12% boost today with Serial ATA-150 adapters, like Promise Technologies's SATA150 TX4 and SATA150 TX2Plus.

Newer chipsets, such as the Intel 865PE, provide a separate data bus dedicated to faster storage devices. (For example, the 865PE provides a 150 MBps bus for Serial ATA.)

Serial ATA devices have spindle speeds and access times similar to the drives we're already used to—7,200 RPM and 8.5 milliseconds. As drive manufacturers adapt their faster 10,000 and 15,000 RPM SCSI or Fibre Channel drive products with 4.7 and 3.6 millisecond access times to SATA, we begin to see a true performance enhancement for storage on everyday desktop systems. Still, various performance tests would lead us to believe that we could already achieve a 20% performance boost in data reading by switching to SATA—an improvement worthy of serious consideration.

The best way to achieve a storage speed boost using SATA drives today is to use them in a RAID-1 through RAID-5 configuration, which SATA is ideal for. SATA drives can be hot-plugged (connected and disconnected), just like you may be used to with your USB camera or FLASH-drive/memory stick, under Windows XP (Windows 2000 does not support hot-plugging these devices and complains when you disconnect them), so swapping out a failed drive can be done without a lengthy system reset or power down.

For those who like to trick out their PC cases with lights and cool-looking cables, SATA's seven-wire data cable will help put an end to ribbon-cable-clutter. The connectors measure just 8 mm wide, and the cables can be up to a meter (39") long, allowing for more flexible drive placement than is possible with parallel ATA.

Keep SATA in mind, look for system boards with true SATA interfaces for eventually faster performance rather than limiting SATA with a sluggish PCI-based SATA interface board, and give your data a test-drive. To upgrade a non-SATA system to a SATA drive, you'll need to follow these steps:

Check your system board maker's web site to see if there are any issues with their BIOS and supporting SATA add-in cards (and get an upgrade if there is one to fix any SATA problems).
Obtain a PCI-to-SATA interface board, with any required driver software included (but always check the manufacturer's web site for updates).
Get a SATA cable.
Get a SATA power cable (to get power from the interface board) or an adapter to get power from a standard 4-pin-drive power connector.
With the PC power turned off, follow the instructions to install the interface board—but install the drivers first if required, then power off and install the board. Make sure Windows recognizes the new board with the Add New Hardware wizard when you start up again.
Shut down the system (power off) and install the new disk drive. Make sure Windows recognizes the new drive with the Add New Hardware wizard when you start up again.
For Windows 95/98/Me, partition and format the disk with FDISK and FORMAT in DOS. For Windows 2000 and XP, use the Disk Management tools in Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management.