SATA remains faster. The most interesting performance feature of SATA is the maximum bandwidth possible. The evolution of ATA drives has seen the data transfer rate reach its maximum at 133 MB/second, where the current SATA standard provides data transfers of up to 300 MB/second, or 150 MB/Second in the older SATA units. The overall performance increase of the slowest SATA over ATA, regardless of spindle should be 5% to 8%, but changes in SATA technology have improved on that.
The maximum possible SATA speed currently utilized is 300 MB/Second vs 133 MB/Second for PATA/EIDE . We will see further increases as operating systems grow, but they will require new SATA hard drives as yet unlabled. Spindle speed differences cannot keep up with those differences in actual use.
Conceptually, SATA is a replacement for the older standard (ATA/EIDE), but SATA host-adapters and devices communicate via high-speed serial cables. SATA offers several compelling advantages over the older parallel ATA/EIDE interface. Among them, reduced cable-bulk, 8 pins vs 80, significantly faster and more efficient data transfer, and user ability to perform hot swapping of SATA devices.
Today, SATA has all but replaced the legacy ATA, now retroactively renamed Parallel ATA or PATA. PATA, for now, remains dominant in industrial and embedded applications dependent on Compact Flash technology.
SATA controllers use as their defacto interface the AHCI or Advanced Host Controller Interface which allows these advanced SATA features of “hot plug” and “native command queuing or ”NCQ”. AHCI is not enabled by the motherboard and chipset. One slow-down comes when the SATA controllers work in IDE emulation mode. That IDE emulation doesn’t allow certain features to be accessed if the ATA or EIDE standard does not support them. Windows XP device drivers that are labeled as SATA are usually running in IDE emulation mode unless they explicitly state that they are AHCI. Drivers included with Windows XP do not support AHCI. That is where another confusion comes regarding spindle speeds. Bottom Line: if you have Windows XP, you won’t see a big difference of more than 5% to 10%, but in VISTA, the modern Linux, and Windows 7 you definitely will. SATA will always be at least 5% faster, but can be as high as 50% faster
With the current SATA 3.00 specifications, data transfer rates as high as 3.0 Gbit/s per device are found, vs 1.5 GBs of last year. In addition, SATA uses only 4 signal lines. Cables are cheaper because they are more compact and use less wire. Once Windows 7 comes into play, the differences will be huge, and computers with EIDE drives will be noticeably slower.
![hellokitty[hk]](/community/data/avatars/m/169/169488.jpg?1355088591){kind=avatar}
