What's the Difference Between IDE and ATA Hard Drives?

Might help?

Mikerho that is a fantastic link! Besides answering my question completely (and then some), it gave me a clear understanding of the new SATA protocol and why I should upgrade my engineering workstations from the current SCSI controller based set up to SATA.

I encourage anyone who builds computers or buys components, to view that link.

Thanks Mikerho and all who helped.

L.J.

You're right that was a very informative link. Since you're looking at upgrading I just thought I'd drop another link in. A great place to go window shopping, and they're also mail-order.

The cost of large hard drives has fallen dramatically I just bought two 1 TB SATA II drives for less than a hundred bucks apiece. Series 12 barracudas with a transfer rates almost one third faster than my two year old drives.

Just in the event you aren't aware not only will the board need to be able to accept SATA connectors but also you will need adapters from your power supply.

The good news is that boards are readily available with bundled processor for less than $100 complete with onboard video. Even the current low-end processors will smoke a Pentium 4.

Recommended solution

Mikerho that is a fantastic link! Besides answering my question completely (and then some), it gave me a clear understanding of the new SATA protocol and why I should upgrade my engineering workstations from the current SCSI controller based set up to SATA.

Its great to gain the knowledge but the switch from SCSI to SATA may not be cost effective due the system electronic architecture and the problems this will incur. For clarity SCSI is superior to SATA in performance especially concerning the system in question.

Yes if attempting a SATA upgrade you will need to assign new values in the BIOS and you may need to mirror/embed SATA drivers into the O/S installation disc and install a SATA PCI card.

*Note that some older PCs use 40-conductor IDE cables, not the 80-conductor ones current drives require.

Don't forget... When talking about SATA (Serial ATA) the transfer rates are in Mb(bits!) per second. For more on SATA: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-sata-or-serial-ata.htm

Anyway... An IDE/EIDE type drive should work up to something like 2GB fine on your system. Many manufacturers have a type of Dynamic Drive Overlay 'program' that will let your system 'see' the entire drive if it is larger than what your OS will let it see. Not sure what an ADA drive is at the moment and therefore not sure if it will work.

Help from others would be great! :)

I have seen it somewhere, not sure where!

It might be the IDE compatible SCSI interface or SCSI compatible IDE interface.

Guess : Advanced Data Attachment - maybe even for Flash drives.

I just ran across this forum.

My question is, are these different lettered hard drives interchangeable or is there a difference in how they are hooked into a system?

I know that an external drive will work with any computer because it connects via USB. I am not quite so clear on internal drives.

The reason I ask is because my present computer only has an 80 gig drive and I have no idea what it is. I'd like to upgrade it to at least a 500 gig or possibly a 1T.

Any suggestions?

Ken Leigh

Ken I have just received confirmation of shipment of an order I placed this evening (Wednesday) for: Two brand new Western Digital "Caviar" 250Gb ATA hard drives (7200rpm) for the delivered price of $105.68.

I bought them from Tech for Less.

This is admittedly overkill as they are only for an an e-mail server which I will use to replace the painfully inadequate Pentium 3 Dell I am typing on now and is slower than molasses in winter. The purpose behind two identicle drives is to use Ghost or a similar software to make a mirror backup and forget about the other methids.

The new machine is used Dell Multiplex 250 which I bought on eBay for $50.

Tech for less has taken good care of me in the past and when they told me that the ATA and IDE were one and the same, that made my buying decision easier.

Good luck and thanks again to everyone who offered solutions.

L.J.

Hi LJ,

Hey, if you have any problems, let us know. I would hate to think that any of us offered a bogus solution - even though it may have come from an independent source. I would still want to help in any way I could.

Snickering Ocelot

I built a new gaming system recently and put in a SATA 500GB WD Caviar Black. That drive lived for about 2 months before dieing. By dieing, I mean the drive became unreadable, so the PC could not boot from it. I have had problems with WD's in the past on other systems, and have sworn by Maxtor for years, but I read some good reviews on Newegg and took a gamble. Anyhow, if you can help it I would say get a Maxtor or Seagate over a WD, even if the specs are identical. WD, in my experience at least, makes an inferior product.

To: Vandarye

Suggestion noted and will do.

Ken Leigh

Hmmm - I've owned several WD hard drives and never had a problem with any.

Just my experience.

Mike

When editing audio/video I can do without the noise of the high rpm drives...

You can always go solid state...if you want to pay that kind of price for a drive.

Just a fast note here: Older bios on the motherboard and operating systems will not recognise large hard drives. I think there was a 32GB limit on some older ones and I think XP had a limit of 137GB until you got service pack 1 installed. So, if your new drives aren't recognised, you might want to check for updates to the bios or OS or some work arounds from the HDD manufacturers.

Your older machine may be new enough that you don't have to worry about this, and if it is, just ignore me. You will be fine.

My present computer(?) is a home built, P-4, intel, running at 3.2GHz with 2GHz RAM with an 80GHZ hard drive that was given to me when my friend and neighbor gave it to me.

He built a quad processor with a 1THZ hard drive and 3 GHZ RAM, plus other refinements that I have no clue as to what they are nor what their use is.

So, the question still is, can I interchange these hard drives without problem?

Ken Leigh

Ken,

You will need to figure out what drive type(s) your current system will support. The easiest way to do this would be to have the manual for the motherboard used in the home-built system. It would tell what drive types are supported. If you don't have the motherboard model number, there are some utilities out there that will possibly find it for you. I prefer to just open the case, and find the model number on the motherboard itself, I don't trust that the utilities will always be right!

Perhaps your friend/neighbor has the motherboard model number handy? If you come up with a model number, I'd be happy to look at what drive types and sized it should support.

Tom

Hello Ken,

The easy way to determine system components without opening the case is

to download this free tool, the program has a very small footprint and will run very quickly to give you an excellent report of the system properties from which we can ascertain the system architecture.

Hello Kenneth:

About now you're probably getting too much information. Hopefully I will not make things more confusing.

First you need to identify the type of drive your board uses. You can use a tool such as bywire has suggested, or you can physically open the case and look at the drive.

Most likely you have an ATA connection. This is a connection that utilizes a flat ribbon cable about 2 inches wide can be any color but they're typically gray.

It is unlikely but possible you have an SATA data connection this will be a narrower and thicker cable about a half-inch wide ,again it can be any color but typically red.

Once you have identified the type of drive you can replace it or add a second drive to your machine.

Assuming that you have a ATA drive you are left with the choice of either cloning your old drive to the new one or adding the additional drive.

Many drive kits come with the software and instructions to clone the drive, but it can be somewhat confusing and difficult to do.

To add the drive, you can look and see if your board has a second ATA data connection, if so you can simply plug your new drive into this connection plug the power connection in your drive, and your operating system will identify the drive and give it a letter.

In the alternative your existing data cable should have two connectors, they can be plugged into individual hard drives in your computer. To do it this way you will have to change some settings on the second drive. The drive will have a connector diagram for the pin jumpers, you will have to set the second drive to be a slave. After that it will fire up as previously described.

Others have already mentioned that your operating system may have to be updated to identify a larger capacity drive, once you've done that you should be good to go. When you get that far you will need to format the new drive which is easily done with your existing software.

I will refrain from describing the procedure to keep from adding to the confusion at this point. But it is the simplest part of the whole operation. When you reach that point let us know and many will be glad to help you with the procedure if you need help.

Unimportant but passing point on nomenclature drive capacity is measured in gigabytes GB.

PS: I don't know if your neighbors still around, but if this is your first drive replacement it's always helpful to have someone that's done it before. With the computer on the table it only requires 5 or 10 minutes to physically install a new hard drive.

In the alternative your existing data cable should have two connectors, they can be plugged into individual hard drives in your computer. To do it this way you will have to change some settings on the second drive. The drive will have a connector diagram for the pin jumpers, you will have to set the second drive to be a slave. After that it will fire up as previously described.

Assigning slave isn't required because it doesn't have a boot sector on it thus it will be designated as the slave by default.

The operation got simpler just connect the new drive to the middle connector of the ribbon cable and viola`

I do consider this as the best alternative because is essentially plug and play.

Hello bwire:

I undoubtedly stand corrected, I previously remember setting the second drive when connecting to the same ribbon to slave. Truthfully I've always run raid 0 arrays in my computers, so I really haven't played too much with putting two drives on a single ribbon. You're right that would the operation simpler.

PS: A USB hard drive is simpler, but also seems to come with some problems for instance my system will not boot if I leave the USB hard drive plugged in. Since I only use it for backup this is not much of a problem, only annoying when I forget and leave the drive plugged in and go to reboot.

Besides it is so much fun taking these things apart and putting them back together. I recently installed two 1 TB hard drives in my computer in a raid array, do not ask me what I can possibly use that much storage for but it's in the top 1% of transfer rates on the PC pitstop test.

Do not ask me why I needed to go that fast I guess it's just because it can.

If you are having problems booting when your external USB drive is connected to your pc, then all you likely need to do to fix that particular problem is adjust the boot order in your BIOS. I typically run my systems to boot from C: first for speed, but most systems will boot CD-ROM (or floppy if your system is really old!) first, then move on to the HDD's. So, in your device list, you should see 2 drives, your internal HDD, and your external HDD, make sure the internal is set to boot device 1 (or 2 if you want your system check for a boot disk first), bump your external/USB HDD to the last option if it doesn't have a bootable OS.

Thanks for the advice, I'll check and make sure that the boot order is set up correctly.

The EIDE-ATA drives I ordered will be here in 24 hours. Since I ordered those I went and purchased the second of two laps tops. The first one 3 months ago is a Dell with a fast Intel processor and mechanical hard drive. The second one, a HP Mini has 2 Gbytes of RAM and a 16 gByte virtual disk. The choice to purchase the $400 mini was made instantaneously when an engineer I work with showed me the same machine, running Catia V5, release 19!!

Admittedly, I have no intention of doing any serious design work on my own HP Mini and while I have loaded Solidworks on mine, the use of any serious work with Solidworks, Pro E and Catia will be limited to my office workstation.

My point is that hard drives and keyboards are the weakest link in our systems and I suspect likely to disappear very soon.

L.J.

ATA-IDE was the standard interface for computers back in the 1980s and was designed to ensure compatibility with hard drives, CD or DVD drives. ATA-IDE is commonly referred to using other terms such as IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics), ATA, or PATA (Parallel ATA).

IDE is markedly different from ESDI (Enhanced Small Disk Interface) and SCSI since the controllers are found on each drive. Therefore, the ATA-IDE hard drive will connect directly to a controller or motherboard. For the ATA/IDE, data transfer will range between 5MB/s and 133MB/s speeds.

Depending on your needs, you can get hard drives across different storage capacities and read/write speeds including 160GB-7.2K RPM or 160GB-5.4K RPM, 250GB-7.2K RPM or 250GB-5.4K RPM, 300GB-5.4K RPM or 300GB-7.2K RPM, 320GB-5.4K RPM or 320GB-7.2K RPM, and all the way to 750GB capacity.

I am looking at ata hdd hard drive specs that I got recently for my system, and for info I am sharing below

Product Type: Internal Hard Drive (HDD)

Sub-Type: ATA-IDE

Technical Information

Form Factor 2.5" x 1/8HCapacity 250 GB

Interface Type ATA-100

Buffer Size 8 MB

Features Shock Guard, WhisperDrive, DuraStep Ramp

Compliant Standards S.M.A.R.T.

Performance

Drive Transfer Rate 100 MBPS (External)Seek Time 12 MS (Average) / 21 MS (Max)

Track-to-Track Seek Time 2 MS

Average Latency 5.5 MS

Spindle Speed 5400 RPM

Reliability

Non-Recoverable Errors 1 Per 10^14

Start / Stop Cycles 600,000

Expansion / Connectivity

Interfaces 1 x ATA-100 - 44 Pin IDCCompatible Bays 1 x internal - 2.5" x 1/8H

Miscellaneous

Compliant Standards RoHS

Environmental Parameters

Min Operating Temperature 41 °FMax Operating Temperature 140 °F

Humidity Range Operating 8 - 90%

Shock Tolerance 250 g at 2MS (Operating) / 900 g at 1MS (Non-Operating)

Vibration Tolerance 1 g at 5-300 Hz (Operating)

Sound Emission 22 DBA

Physical Characteristics

Width 2.8 inDepth 3.9 in

Height 0.4 in

Weight 4.1 Oz

You can study these kind of specs at lots of places, such as seagate, hp, western digital and other manufacturers, do due diligence and not buy anything without proper consultation, I am very cautious buyer.