W3J Confusion.. HELP!

Alright ppl first of all i apologise in advance if this has already been discussed..

We all know for a fact that the W3J is shipping out with a PATA HD irrespective of whether its 4200 or 5400 rpm.. i spoke to a couple of ppl well versed in comp lingo and they told me that the biggest bottle-neck in their opinion would be the fact that the HD is PATA rather than SATA... my understanding is that PATA/SATA have to with the transfer rate while higher rpm results in better read time...could anyone correct me or elaborate on that plz?

now on to the second issue... i have also been told that the SATA HD is not compatible with the W3J... is that really true? so that means there is no option but to have dated HD technology in a latest config system.. doesnt that seem a bit unreasonable?

Thoughts, comments , observations?

cheers!

 

Not true at all. Perhaps in desktops, but not in laptops, as of yet.

 

hi, thanks for the reply... could u plz elaborate on whats true and whats not since i asked quite a few questions .... im really hoping what i said about SATA W3J non-compatibility is false...

 

there was a test done by danny i think, or tom's hardware. it's too early for me to look for it. but maybe i will later. but basically, it shows very marginal performance difference between PATA and SATA systems.

on compatibility, i think i read somewhere a guy fitted a SATA drive to his w3v. but again, i cant remember and it's too early.

 

interested in more info

 

yup me too... all ears

 

Currently don't think there is any noticable difference between PATA and SATA. Maybe when SATAII becomes available, there might be. The difference in HDD speeds 4200/5400/7200 makes so much more of a difference than PATA/SATA. I'd be more worried about that rather than whether it was "dated HD technology" a.k.a. PATA.

 

HD Tune shows the burst rate of the Fujitsu 100GB 5400 rpm SATA HDD in my Samsung X60 as being 77MBs. This is well within the PATA 100MB/s capacity and only half the 150MB/s rating of the interface.

Note that the above is the burst rate. The real HDD performance measure is the transfer rate through the heads. The above HDD has a peak transfer rate of just under 40MB/s. The 7200 rpm HDDs may be a little faster.

Personally, I would have preferred if the X60 had used PATA. SATA still has a small price premium and the PATA versions of new HDDs seem to get into the retail channels sooner.

John

 

+1 for SATA/PATA making no difference. For 4200 and 5400 RPM drives the bottleneck is going to be in the drive's internal sustained transfer speed.

In short, unless you're running 15000 RPM drives or need NCQ support (you don't) the only difference you may notice is transfers to/from the drive's onboard cache.

 

One advantage i don't think has been mentioned yet, is that SATA drives even on notebooks, use less processor resources than their PATA equivilents as the SATA bus is far more efficient. thus increasing their usefulness even if the data throughput isn't improved.

 

You can't use an SATA hard drive in a system set up for PATA... period. Yes the bus on SATA is bigger, but not big enough to show a lot of improvement. Upgrading to a 7200rpm PATA drive will still knock the socks off of the performance of a 5400rpm SATA.... by a long shot... so it's not that big of a deal.

 

hmmm, I wonder if this efficiency is negligible....

 

Another noob question...

is PATA, IDE and ATA-100 the same thing? i was looking for some hd replacements for the w3j and so came across these terms...
cheers

 

more or less. All those terms refer to the same type of HDD connection. I'm pretty sure any 2.5" HDD with any of those "features" should work with the W3J, or any other laptop supporting PATA HDDs.

cheers!