PATA or SATA for an enclosed drive?

October 17, 2006 7:19 PM

If I'm buying a hard disk which will be put into an external enclosure (most likely a 320Gb Seagate), connected via USB2 (not eSATA), is there ANY practical difference (apart from the $5-10 price difference) between picking PATA or SATA?
posted by pompomtom to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Your next computer probably won't have a PATA port.
posted by smackfu at 7:31 PM on October 17, 2006

Actually, for me, PATA is still preferable, and I just purchased a 320gb PATA drive. Why? Because every old machine and every USB enclosure supports it, which means I have the maximum possible flexibility.

It's saved me a few times, doing data recovery, sharing files with friends, and so on.

Just think about it, if you buy PATA/IDE you can use your enclosure with every other disk you own. That alone is worth something.
posted by fake at 7:49 PM on October 17, 2006

As fake and smackfu pointed out above, there are practical reasons to choose one or the other. You may have your own preferences. However, there is currently no technical (i.e. performance) reason to choose one or the other.
posted by knave at 8:24 PM on October 17, 2006

SATA is newer and has less connectors which will mean that it is more reliable.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 8:34 PM on October 17, 2006

Actually it has exactly the same number of connectors. One for data, and one for power. IDE uses a 40 pin cable, and SATA, a 4 pin cable.

Because you shouldn't be plugging and unplugging these things 10x a day, there should be exactly no difference in reliability.
posted by fake at 8:53 PM on October 17, 2006

I'm pretty sure MonkeySaltedNets meant "fewer pins", not "less connectors"... but still:

The number of pins on a connector has absolutely no bearing on the connector's reliability. When drives fail, it's because they're essentially hunks of metal spinning and thousands of revolutions per second, not because of too many pins.

FUD: it's what's for dinner.
posted by jacobian at 9:03 PM on October 17, 2006

FWIW you can pick up a 400GB Seagate PATA for $89 shipped from Outpost right now.

Just sayin' -- if you're in the hd market, it's a good deal.
posted by fishfucker at 9:29 PM on October 17, 2006

Ta fishfucker, but I'm pretty sure the postage to Australia would kill that deal.
posted by pompomtom at 9:39 PM on October 17, 2006

If it were me I'd probably buy a SATA drive, mostly just because I think PATA interfaces are going to quickly fall out of favor. However, one thing to consider is that USB to SATA bridges aren't yet as common as USB to PATA bridges. Sometimes this results in USB enclosures having the additional complexity of having a USB to PATA bridge and a PATA to SATA bridge connected in series.
posted by RichardP at 10:43 PM on October 17, 2006

It's not going to make much difference. Using a USB 2.0 connection, the maximum theoretical transfer speed is 480 Mbps. SATA runs at 1500 Mbps, SATA-2 at 3000 Mbps, and PATA at about 1000 Mbps (not sure about that PATA figure).

Either way, the USB interface is going to be the bottleneck, at 480 Mbps, or approximately 40 Megabytes/second.
posted by Diag at 3:27 AM on October 18, 2006

Just to expand and clarify what I wrote above, the only difference between consumer grade PATA and SATA hard drives is the interface on the drive. The mechanics at the back end are the same.

But you're using a USB interface to connect to the SATA or PATA, which is much slower than either of them, and thereby makes the difference between them irrelevant.
posted by Diag at 3:40 AM on October 18, 2006

The number of pins on a connector has absolutely no bearing on the connector's reliability.

True, but they can be a pain-in-the-ass, especially if you plug/unplug them a lot. One pin out of forty gets bent over 5 degress and you can't plug the connector in until you straighten it out. And you're screwed if one pin falls out, which is much more likely with 40 of them. Contrast to USB, which never has those problem because it essentially has only one pine (with multiple contact points).
posted by smackfu at 7:42 AM on October 18, 2006