mechanical hdds don't even use ata133 😉
but if you want to use ssd you can use even pcie for that 😉

*flashback to 2002*

1. yes. Any computer will benefit from a faster hard drive. new sata drives can EASILY saturate the pci bus of the first generation sata boards.
2. sata is just like scsi, all versions will work together in harmony. just stay away from SAS.
3. you will probably not need drivers. linux is smart and will work fine, XP did need drivers on the very first versions of sata.

Well I understand faster is better, but would it really be that much faster?

Less IDE and SCSI ribbon cable mess is always good 😀

Yes SATA drives are recognised at the BIOS level. A modern SATA drive should be somewhat faster. It's newer and will likely have lower access times. IMO the main benefit of SATA is being able to install a Solid State Drive.

Also you can use notebook drives. Pull them out of old portable drives. They are quieter and vibrate less.

I use a SATA PCI card in my Pentium machine. Got a 640GB drive in there, created a 60GB Partition and it has all my DOS games on there. Works very well and reliably.

Newer drives are more dense. This translates into a faster linear transfer rate, because at the same rotational speed more data is passing under the head per second. (As far as I'm aware, modern drives don't use interleaving and keep up with every bit, but I could be wrong)
Depending how old your ATA133 drive is, there might be a huge difference in the transfer rate of a new drive.
Access times might not be very much different though. Access depends on rotational speed and the speed of the head mechanism, and those aren't things that have changed much in new drives vs old. But it does vary depending what the emphasis was in the design of that drive.
Indirectly though, a newer drive can have faster access because of it's density. If the amount of data is a constant, it will fit in less physical space on a newer drive, so the head doesn't have to move as far.

I don't know if your board/chipset has a separate higher speed link for the disk interface or if it's on the PCI bus. But if it's on PCI, both ATA133 and SATA150 can saturate a traditional 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus. Even if that's not an issue, 133 vs 150MB/sec isn't a big difference.

I think the main difference you'd see would be the transfer rate (from physical platters) of a new drive vs old one, not so much the interface it uses. An older, less dense drive may run significantly below what the interface can handle.

Access times between a 7200rpm ATA133 drive and a 7200rpm SATA would be around the same. You'd be surprised that access times of newer 500gb- 2TB drives are rarely faster than the old ATA133 drives.
@ 13ms or so usually.

What would greatly increase would be transfer rates, assuming you're replacing your ATA133 with a modern SATA 500gb or larger disk. An old ATA133 drive would be in the range of 60mb/s max and in new SATA drives up to 150mb/s. If you went with a 2 disk raid-0 array using even 2 cheap WD Blue 500gb for instance (~220mb/s), you'd see really strong SATA 1 bus saturating transfer rates (constant 150mb/s straight line).

SSD drives are AMAZING in terms of speed. they SUCK with their price and reliability. I just recently sold 2 of my 40gb ssd drives, got $35 each from ebay. I bought 4 new 64gb sata3 ssd drives to replace them. Sadly, these drives are only working at about 66% of their potential in my system. My sata controller is saturated and just cant handle the data. That said, I keep my games on a 4 drive 640gb WD-black array. WD-black drives are the "premium" conventional hard drive. This is what benchmarks look like on my system; the WD-black drives are on the LEFT and the SSD disks are on the RIGHT.

Well I know this may sound stupid but don't ATA133 drives transfer at 133 MB/s.....isn't that what ATA133 MEANS, versus ATA100, ATA66, ATA33??

ncmark wrote:

Well I know this may sound stupid but don't ATA133 drives transfer at 133 MB/s.....isn't that what ATA133 MEANS, versus ATA100, ATA66, ATA33??

its per CHANNEL. so 2 drives will share the 133. sata is completely independent. now the ORIGINAL sata, pci will bottleneck the total to ~133mb/s. That is again shared by EVERYTHING that isnt agp on your motherboard.

gigabit Ethernet can pull 100MB/s by itself. So with new drives on an old system, you are going to bottleneck something somewhere. take my benchmark above, the ssd drives are bottlenecked by the 533mhz speed of my raid controller. If I can find a way to un-cripple it to the 800mhz version, I would get full speeds. on the left benchmark you can see what 4 high performance drives will do in a raid. keep in mind, these particular drives are ~3 years old!

personally, sata vs ide doesn't matter in 'retro' machines. The only real advantage being is the cables are wonderful compared to ide. And old sata drives are increasingly cheap.

I see - I did not know that!

Another benefit of using a PCI SATA controller card on an old Computer is that it has no issues detecting large drives. Now you still need to keep OS partition size limits in mind, but at least the drive gets detected without any issues.

SATA DVD drives also work. But unfortunately they don't have analogue audio outputs anymore. So if you play a game that uses Audio CD Music you are out of luck.

With floppy drive emulators now becoming available, the whole storage system can be made up of current parts. The main thing what my Retro DOS Time-Machine is all about 😀

You can get drive bays for 3.5" and 5.25" that let you slot in drives and pull them out. Great for cloning and having various installations going. As luckybob, old SATA drives are incredibly cheap.

And finally you can also use SATA to IDE converter chips. I have a few models and they all work fine. One is a dual adapter, so you can connect two SATA drives into one IDE channel.

What's a good DOS application to benchmark disk performance? Is there anything useful on the Ultimate Boot CD? Wouldn't mind looking into that...

But then, how much can a Pentium do anyway...

ncmark wrote:

Well I know this may sound stupid but don't ATA133 drives transfer at 133 MB/s.....isn't that what ATA133 MEANS, versus ATA100, ATA66, ATA33??

That's how fast the interface is capable of transferring data. That doesn't mean the drive will achieve that, or do so consistently.
For example, an ATA133 drive might transfer 133MB/sec from it's cache. Reading from the physical platters will be slower, it might achieve say 80MB/sec at the beginning of the disk (outer regions of the disk), down towards 40MB/sec at the end (inner regions) of the disk.
<Those numbers aren't accurate, I made them up for illustration.>

Depending on the bus architecture of your motherboard/chipset, there could also be other limitations from sharing bandwidth with other devices on the PCI bus. Some systems have separate buses for some functions to reduce or eliminate that problem.
If I'm not mistaken, from a quick web search I think your board uses the KT600 chipset. It appears the ATA133/SATA ports are controlled by the southbridge directly. So the drive connections might not be using PCI bandwidth. They would still use the bandwidth of the north/southbridge link, but that link should be faster than PCI on a chipset of that period.

Because of the various real-world factors, ATA133 performed pretty much the same as ATA100. I think it was Maxtor who patented ATA133, and their competitors didn't bother to license it because ATA100 worked just as well.

SATA is just fine. It's even cheaper than the IDE counterparts (at least over here) since PATA (IDE) drives are getting rarer to find nowadays.

Performance wise, at the same RPM and size, both should be similar.

SATA cables are really good and easy to manage. It also improves air circulation in the case.

The SATA headers are small, both on the motherboard and the hard drives. But that's more helpful for motherboard designers for better designs and adding more features to the now more free surface areas.

Most new motherboard BIOS support different operation methods - enabling SATA to be identified as IDE to softwares, etc.

I don't like the right angle sata connectors too much - I've already broken two connectors by mistake - they are a bit delicate. None the less sata is quite a bit better that their IDE counterparts and I've invested in some ide/sata adapers so I can run my retro rigs off sata, and service my ide drives off my main sata based rig.

Just tested my Pentium MMX 133 and with a Silicon Image PCI SATA card and a 640GB WD Blue I'm getting a transfer speed of just over just 10MB/s. That's with system info benchmark.

So if you have only one drive on an ATA133 cable, does that mean the one drives gets the full through-out or only half?

leileilol wrote:

Less IDE and SCSI ribbon cable mess is always good 😀

I used IDE round cables and take the stupid rubber boots/covers off the ends/connectors.

ncmark wrote:

So if you have only one drive on an ATA133 cable, does that mean the one drives gets the full through-out or only half?

The one drive will get all the bandwidth that is available on that channel. There can be various other bottlenecks in the system though.