IDE vs SATA

[Fitz Townsend]

I built my own computer for AVCHD editing. Thought I was so smart, but I installed WinXP in IDE mode in the BIOS, and realize I can't max out my awesome/extreme/motherboard of death SATA III speeds.

Turns out, what a headache to switch from IDE to SATA in XP!

Then I started looking at transfer rates of the HDD's that I use. WD Black 7200rpm, 1TB. This is listed at 126MB/s on WD's site, well under the 150MB/s of SATA I.

So there is no way I'll get anywhere near the bus speeds of SATA II or III without a velociraptor or SSD, right?

And I'm usually editing video combining no more than three streams of AVCHD.


So.... there's no reason to worry about a disk bottleneck, right? It's still all in the processor.

Or am I taking a big hit from NCQ, pulling streams from different parts of the same HDD? (No raid, here)

[Panagiotis Raris]

If you have a SATA III capable and equipped motherboard, you certainly have many superior options than IDE or SATA I speeds.

Specs and specifics on your system and hardware would help a lot. HDD speeds drop off depending on file sizes, and initialization/format settings, and depend on what you intend to use them for. Its give and take, and complicated. I do recommend, as do many others, more than one HDD; please give system specs and software specs so we can help further.

[Fitz Townsend]

Thanks for your message, Panagiotis, and I'm sorry for the long delay. Nov and Dec got crazy for me. Hope everyone has had a wonderful Holiday and Blessed New Year so far!

I'm going to start a new thread, with a big info-dump of all my stats, since I think my questions go far beyond the scope of IDE vs SATA, in the hopes of categorizing threads in a way that is useful to others doing searches.

[Trevor Dennis]

Fitz have you finished building your system and been able to test the drives? I'm guessing that you won't be able to get 125MB/s sustained throughput. When I built my 3930K based system about a year ago, I tried to get away without using raid0 for DSLR footage despite warning from Harm etc. on the Adobe Premiere Pro hardware forum, and suffered jerky scrubs of the timeline. Setting up two raid0s, with project files on a pair of Velociraptors in a raid0 fixed the problem.

This system was not a slouch, and still stands at number 14 in the PPBM5 table

Benchmark Results

I don't think you've said what you are editing with, but if it is Premiere Pro, you are heading for trouble.

[Luis Valenzuela]

Installing SATA drivers for windows usually happens during the OS installation (When the legend says 'press F6 to install sata/raid/3rd party drives' or something similar) and is a real pita to get SATA working if not done that way.

Having said that, here is the easiest solution to get your SATA devices running in SATA and no IDE mode:

update your motherboard to the latest BIOS, which usually will have the correct SATA drivers and will swith the transfer mode to SATA in your BIOS.

Or better yet, update BIOS to the latest (from your motherboard vendor support page), re-install windows with everything SATA.
I move data between a SATA drive and an SSD on sata interface at amazing speeds, and I did just the above suggestion a few days ago.

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Fitz Townsend

Then I started looking at transfer rates of the HDD's that I use. WD Black 7200rpm, 1TB. This is listed at 126MB/s on WD's site, well under the 150MB/s of SATA I.

The highest quality 28mbps AVCHD video takes 3.5MB/s which easily fits through the 100MB/s IDE bottleneck. Interactions between system software, disk buffer size and native drive speed make it difficult to predict exactly what will happen. However, native AVCHD workflows are generally constrained by processing power rather than disk speed.

Note that if you work with intermediate formats such as DNxHD or ProRes then disk speed becomes more important. Also note that NTFS is quicker than FAT style filesystems and Windows 7 does a better job scheduling tasks to run on multicore CPUs than does Windows XP.