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freestyler105 said:I just upgraded from IDE to SATA a few days ago. To sum up the difference, the load times of Windows XP MCE was cut in half comparing clean installs on each drive. If you're going to be moving files around a lot (like I do), there will be a pretty big difference.
As for gaming, it really depends on the game. A game with huge amounts of detail and large areas, such as Oblivion or FEAR will show a decent performance boost. On the other hand, if you're only playing Zoo Tycoon and such, you won't notice.
From a technical standpoint, the fastest IDE drives are only up to 133 MB/s. The fastest SATA drives are up to 300 MB/s. So in theory, SATA is over 2 times as fast as IDE. (comparing ATA133 to SATA 3.0 Gb/s) I say in theory because the speed is also limited by how many RPM the drive is. If it's only a 7200RPM drive, there isn't much of a difference.
Basically, if you want to save the 50 bucks, it won't really make that much of a difference, except in the not so distant future SATA is going to overtake IDE as the standard.
i have a question for ya. You upgraded to a SATA harddrive from an IDE hdd which is exactly what i plan to do but (i dont know if you did it or not) is it possible to transfer data from the IDE hdd over to a SATA hdd? I've never heard of someone doing this so i thought i'd ask. Maybe you know?