I'm using some ATA133 Western Dig drives with convertor cards on my SATA bus. These drives are specing out at 41-42 Mb/sec. No real noticeable improvement in speed with Vegas 4. FWIW, reports are that the 10,000RPM SATA drives run HOT. Not sufficient performance gain to make it worth dealing with the extra heat.

I have 2 SATA drives (Seagate 120 GIGs) and configured as 1 drive for a total of 240 gigs. The OS is on the same drive as well. I can't really tell if it's much faster than IDE when rendering (I guess other factors come into play as well. ie. cpu speed). But it's quick enough for me.

Considering that the OS and my video capturing is on the same drive (I was told that I cannot set-up 1 master SATA drive and another SATA drive as my slave), I was able to capture video at 740*480 for 2 continuous hours without 1 dropped frame.

Vegas works great but not any faster other than maybe the load-up time.

I'm debating on buying an IDE drive to serve as my master OS drive and slave the two SATA drives..This is because I notice bad clusters when doing a chkdsk. It kinda scares me since this computer is only used for Vegas (not even connected to the net). the problem is cleared after the chkdsk (done weekly)

I hope this helps.

From what I've seen over at www.tomshardware.com, SATA offers a smaller connector, a thinner cable, a longer cable, and theoretically higher transfer speeds. My conclusion is that there is no compelling need today, but someday it will be useful.

I have to agree that there's not much reason to go for SATA yet.

SATA is at the bottom of it's spec. ATA 150 is the slowest speed planned.
SATA cannot be used as Master/Slave. Each drive gets a channel to itself.
SATA is supposed to be hot-swappable. (This would be unlikely in Master/Slave configurations). This ought to make it a good choice for a drive that could be slotted into a removable drive bay in your chassis or in a 1394 case.

Mboards using the intel 865/875 chipsets could have faster SATA performance. The idea is that SATA run directly off the Intel southbridge would have more throughput than, for instance, an onboard Promise chip running off the PCI buss. That was the idea, anyway.

Rob Mack

Wow thanks for all the advise. Looks like if I need to get more space I will go with an SATA Drive but until then I will stay with my ATA Drives.

Another question does SATA offer me more expandability beyong the 4 IDE drives that my mobo supports today?

I have 2 SATA ports one is standard and the other is a RAID 0 version.

I'm not sure how that can be.

SATA allows for one drive per port. To use raid you would have to use two ports. One SATA port for SATA raid is like a one armed man clapping. Nothing happens.

Regardless, you should be able to use either SATA port for single drives outside of an array, or you can use XP Pro to create an array, or if the motherboard manufacturer implemented it you can do a hardware level raid array with that intel chipset.

(At least i think that's the case)

There's not really that much reason to do striped array. You probably don't need the speed AND most arrays add CPU overhead. Raid also increases the upkeep cost of your system.

The only place where the maintenence cost goes down is with a mirroring array. In that case you'll save money over the time lost when a hard drive dies with precious data on it.

As far as expandability goes, you've currently got 2 IDE channels for 4 possible drives plus either 2 or 4 SATA ports for 2 or 4 SATA drives (one per port).

You can always add more controller cards for more drives.

If you do some research and find that you can use removable drive cartridges in 5.25" bays then you can swap drives in and out of the system as needed. You could use 2 bays for SATA drives and have maybe 2x200GB drives on tap at any moment with more drives on the shelf for project storage.

There are a lot of ways to have lots of storage. You can usually use 1394 for DV (except when it doesn't work).

Rob Mack