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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Allanon" data-source="post: 1934639" data-attributes="member: 8513">SATA does not entail a huge boost in drive speed. The most important factors determining how fast your drive is are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Master/Slave, does your harddrive share it's IDE cable with for example a DVD-drive or burner? Giving a drive an separate IDE channel will give it a moderate speedboost.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Partitions, is your drive partitioned in multiple volumes? Repartitioning it to a single volume will give you more performance because multiple partitions will cause a drive to have to shift position more slowing it down.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">RPM, the higher the RPM the faster ik can rotate to the desired data (ofcourse this means that it also produces more sound)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Cache size, a 2mb cache size is slower than a 8mb cache size.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fragmentation, if you are not a regular user of defragmentation software this could give your exisiting system a huge boost by running defrag. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The drives manufacturer, some drives are faster for certain kind of operations, this differs between manufacturers and shouldn't matter a whole lot.</li> </ul>The difference between ata100 and ata133 aren't all that big, and sata doesn't at a whole lot to it. The matter of the fact is that although sata has more bandwidth dan ata133 most (if not all) drives cannot use all of that bandwidth. Only data read directly from the diskcache reaches those speeds and the diskcache on modern drives isn't larger than 8 mb, which means that everything larger than 8 mb needs to be read from the disk. And if your disk is also fragmented it needs to read it from different parts of the platter slowing the proces down even more.If on the other hand your thinking of doing RAID 0 (Stripping) with two Western Digital Raptors then I've said nothing because that will entail a huge speedboost (just don't create separate partitions).</blockquote>

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