serial ata 100 v. 150???

[jnc007]

I'm looking to buy a new hard drive. I'm still looking at the Sata drives, but I'm keeping my options open. While looking at the standard ata drives I notice one that said ata 100 and one that said 150. What's the difference? Which is the standard?

[Stuey]

The choice between SATA drives is between 150 and 300 (Gb/sec) with the first relating to SATA I and the later referring to "SATA II" or true SATA II. Which one you should get depends on what your motherboard supports. But yea... there is no SATA 100 drive. Even if the drive is not a native SATA drive (meaning they slapped a SATA interface onto an ATA HD) it will be advertised as SATA150.

[jnc007]

Sorry stuey83, maybe I was unclear. I'm fine on the SATA front, for now. What I was askin about was the ATA drives. The standard wide strip IDE drives. Newegg listed an ultra ata 100 and a 150. I don't recall seeing two different types and I was wondering what the standard is?

[yeoamuca]

there is no ultra ata 150(that i know of)
there is 66 100 and 133
these refer to the speed
its like sata 150 and 3.0 refer to speed
the standard now for ide is the ultra ata 133
alot still use 100 though
and 66 isnt very common

[Cricket]

IDE (or PATA) hard drives topped out at ATA133. There were no ATA150 IDE (PATA) hard drives. Anything higher than ATA133 is a SATA hard drive.

IDE (PATA) hard drives are basically old technology.

SATA hard drives are newer technology and is basically the new standard.

The ATAxxx you see refers to the maximum burst transfer rate the hard drive is capable of. That means the hard drive can transfer that amount of data for a short period of time (the burst rate) but the sustained rates are much lower.

The hard drive spindle speed (RPM) is a good indicator of how well the hard drive will perform. The faster the spindle speed, the better the performance will be.

Cricket

[Stuey]

Oh. Your title says "serial ata 100 v. 150" so I drew assumptions from it.

There is no ATA 150. It's going to be ATA 100 or ATA 133. From what I've read, the performance difference between ATA 100 and ATA 133 interface is theoretical and is negligible in real-world applications. From the two, I believe ATA 100 would be more "standard" due to the volume of drives released with that interface. Recently Seagate released a new series of drives (7200.9) and they released SATA drives and ATA 100 drives.

In terms of cost-benefit, ATA 100 drives are on sale every week at the major national retailers, with 160 GB drives and 250 GB drives (Western Digital, Seagate, MAxtor, Hitachi) going for as cheap as 4 gigs per dollar.

I just checked on Newegg and Western Digital and Seagate either never offered ATA 133 drives or they don't offer them any more.

I'm probably still misinterpretting your question, but I figure this info *might* be at least a little bit helpful.

EDIT:
Eh, I'm a slow typer. But still... if you're on a tight budget and don't care about the interface, you can get an IDE drive (either with rebates or on sale) for half the price of a similar capacity SATA drive. If the cost isn't an issue, the benefits of a SATA drive most likely will outweigh the price difference.