Do SATA adapters really boost performance on an IDE drive?

[MatthewHSE]

Having put a SATA drive in my last computer, I'm extremely impressed with the performance. So I've been thinking about trying to convert some of the IDE drives around here over to SATA.

I've seen adapters that plug right into the back of an IDE drive that supposedly transform it into a SATA. Do these actually boost the performance of the drive? If so, for just $10.00 each, I'll gladly buy adapters rather than full drives for all the IDE's around here.

[jeffd]

From what I understand, no, that wouldn't speed anything up. When you buy a SATA drive and plug it into a SATA motherboard or controller card, it will be able to transfer data at 150 mB per second, that's SATA 1, what we have now. SATA 2 is coming, some units of which will support 300 mB per second transfer speeds [read more at serialata.org].

So your old hard drives are set to run at I assume UDMA 6 I think, 133mB per second data transfer. All an adapter will do is let you use the IDE drive on SATA channel, probably not a very good idea I suspect.

[MatthewHSE]

Well, that's about what I thought, too. I just couldn't see an adapter like that actually making a performance difference (particularly after reading about someone who used one on a CD drive). If all it does is put the IDE on the SATA channel, I'm not about to try it when there's no need to do so. Just have to wait until I can justify the expense of a real upgrade . . .

[jimbeetle]

Recently read an article in a mobo magazine -- No, I'm not a gearhead yet, just had some time to kill at an airport -- that tested two of these things with no performance improvement.

As always, if it's too good to be true...

[tommie j]

as always, your limited by the system bus. your basic drive is rated at 133mbs but usually averages 60-65 mb(read). sure, the burst rates are higher(especially in a raid config) but doesnt mean much in real world. until bus speeds improve this is as good as it gets. havnt you noticed that usb2 never gets the 400mbs speed it boasts?

tommie j

[jeffd]

:: Quote ::

havnt you noticed that usb2 never gets the 400mbs speed it boasts?

Yeah, USB doesn't really do it, Firewire I think has a higher sustained transfer speed, though USB 2 has a slightly higher burst rate. At least that's what most reviews I read said, I've gotten pretty good write performance off firewire.