OS Drive: IDE vs. SATA

[Ryand833]

Hello All,

I'm trying to decide if I should use an IDE drive or an SATA drive for my OS. I've already got two drives sitting at my disposal, a Western Digital 40GB IDE 7200RPM drive, and a Maxtor 40GB SATA150 7200RPM drive.

I'm wondering if I'd lose anything in O/S performance if i go with the IDE drive instead of the SATA drive. By doing this, though, I also free up another SATA slot on the motherboard, allowing more capabilities for future storage expansion.

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether or not there would be a noticeable performance decrease if going with IDE over SATA?

Thanks in advance

**EDIT** By the way, I'll be running linux on the system, and the rest of the specs are: MSI K8N Neo4-F motherboard (nforce4 chipset), AMD Athlon64 3200+ proc, 1GB Corsair XMS DDR400 ram

[lobosrul]

If you lost any performance, it would be slight, and probably not noticeable.

If I was building a new system, I would use up my IDE ports for system drives/DVD drives, and save the SATA ports for Sage Media/DVD storage.

Edit: are you really going to use a 40GB drive (maybe you meant 400GB)? You can get a 250GB drive for around $30-40 more than a 40GB. Your price per GB goes waaaaay down.

[Ryand833]

Well, the thing is, I already have these 40GB, and I've had them for quite some time now (they're not recent purchases), and they've just been sitting here gathering dust.

Thanks for the reply, and I think I will go ahead and go with the 40GB IDE for my OS.

[jbarr]

I know you want to keep as many SATA slots open, but if you have a spare SATA slot and you want something to do with the extra 40GB SATA drive (assuming you use the 40GB IDE as your OS drive) why not connect it to an open SATA port and use it as an OS backup drive? Sure, a Linux/SageTV setup doesn't eat up much space on a 40GB drive, but it can't hurt to maintain an backup. Just use any favorite Linux backup scheme.

I run Windows XP Pro, and I created a backup partition on my 320GB SATA drive (I didn't have a spare drive handy.) I use Acronis True Image to do weekly full and nightly incremental backups. It's all transparant, and saved my butt at least once

[Ryand833]

Originally Posted by jbarr

I know you want to keep as many SATA slots open, but if you have a spare SATA slot and you want something to do with the extra 40GB SATA drive (assuming you use the 40GB IDE as your OS drive) why not connect it to an open SATA port and use it as an OS backup drive? Sure, a Linux/SageTV setup doesn't eat up much space on a 40GB drive, but it can't hurt to maintain an backup. Just use any favorite Linux backup scheme.

I run Windows XP Pro, and I created a backup partition on my 320GB SATA drive (I didn't have a spare drive handy.) I use Acronis True Image to do weekly full and nightly incremental backups. It's all transparant, and saved my butt at least once

That is a great idea. I can do that until I need the extra slot for more storage (if that time ever comes)