My dual XP 1600 system is just acting way too flakey these days, so I decided to replace the motherboard. The motherboard in question has serial ATA. On a whim I researched a little bit and found the drives to be reasonably priced.

You have 7200 RPM and 10000 RPM, 7200 RPM serial ATA drives fall within my price range 10000's don't. The question is, will a serial ATA 7200 RPM drive out perform a regular IDE 133 7200 RPM drive? If so, how exactly?

I didn't get my SATA drive for performance, but I can tell it works very well. Better than my older ATA drives. I got the 250GB Western Digital drive.

This is a good site for reviews. Here's the review of the 250GB drive.

I agree, the 10K drives are nice and fast, but it's tough to justify that price. I'd probably be willing to get the 36 GB for purely an OS drive, but I'd want it for video editing, and that wouldn't leave space for much video.

Also, it's a bit of a pain to load the drivers correctly to boot with one of these, depending on how you're set up. I love having mine as a simple storage drive. I currently have nothing but TV shows on it, and it's half full

No, it won't. The interface still isn't the bottleneck when it comes to HD speeds. A harddisk that does 40-50mb/s can be considered a VERY speedy harddisk. I don't even think there are harddisks around that are faster than that (yet). Considering the IDE interface does 133mb/s max, you've still got a lot of margin left. This margin shrinks with two drives on the same cable, but it's still adequate. Only in some IDE RAID setups, the ATA133 interface is not speedy enough.

Also, you have to know that almost ALL serial ATA harddisks that are out now (with the exception of Seagate S-ATA HD's) are in fact ATA133 harddisks that use a serial bridge chip to be able to use the S-ATA interface. So serial ATA disks CAN'T be faster than their ATA133 counterparts, because they are the same disks.

So what are the benefits now for using S-ATA ? Thinner cables... Yup, that's about it.

In the future (more specifically with the S-ATA II standard), other clever stuff (that now already exists with the more expensive SCSI drives) will be implemented in the protocol and then there WILL be a speed advantage. But not just yet.

This said, I would like to point out that I use S-ATA disks myself, and the thinner cables alone makes them worth their price IMO.

Thanks guys, I ended up ordering a 160 GB samsung Serial ATA, never tried samsung so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Samsung HD's are supposed to be pretty good. They are about the most silent drives out there, silent pc advocates swear by them. They are not top of the line when it comes to performance, but they are still very decent.
FWIW, I think you've made a good choice.

the thinner cables alone makes them worth their price IMO

Agreed! That part is absolutely wonderful. As the fourth drive in my case, it's nice not to have to snake those giant IDE cables around, even a rounded one.

You also don't have to worry about master/slave stuff with SATA drives, do you? That's a nice feature.

So here's a question, I just noticed my new mobo encorporates serial ata raid, it also talks to me during post , (I didn't notice that it had serial ata raid because I honestly just wanted a new motherboard and swear by ASUS, I got the biggest, best AMD XP board they had.) Do you think it'd be worth it to run a raid 0 config with serial ATA?

You also don't have to worry about master/slave stuff with SATA drives, do you? That's a nice feature.

Yeah, because they've eliminated the idea of slaves. If you never connect a slave drive, you can eliminate that worry from PATA too...

Peter

Yeah, because they've eliminated the idea of slaves.

I'm sure the people of Los Angeles will be happy.

Do you think it'd be worth it to run a raid 0 config with serial ATA?

Yes, definitely !
Your HD speed (and thus your overall system speed since the HD is still the slowest part in a PC) will increase immensely. The pure HD speed will double.

Only bad thing is that this also doubles the risk of loosing all your data, because if one of those HD's fails, all your data is gone. But not to worry, if you backup early and backup often there's nothing to worry about.

Hehe, yeah mine talks to me during POST as well I turned it off, though

Which board is it?

It did get a little annoying after the 5th or 6th frickin reboot