Jun Qian already made comments on this, but I can give you my own
experience. I have an Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard that has SATA RAID
controller on board. Since SATA drives were not yet shipping, I installed
two WD800JB drives with a pair of Iwill SATA to ATA adaptors. Intel uses a
Silicon Image controller and provides drivers by SI. However, these drivers
are NOT Microsoft certified. They work fine, though, on my XP system and I
have had no problems. My system boots from the RAID 0 setup, and disk speed
seems to be quite good compared to regular (non RAID) ATA interface. I did
run tests on it, and the speed of the SATA RAID was about twice that of the
ATA drive, and also quite a bit faster than an SCSI drive. I have not tested
the SATA vs. ATA without RAID.

I don't know if it is worth going to SATA just for SATA sake. In my case, I
wanted to run RAID 0 and it is available on the motherboard only through the
SATA interface.

Peter
-----------------------------------------------
The NoSpin Group
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-----Original Message-----
SATA hard drives seem to be the current flavour of the month - does any have
any experience with the product?  Are they significantly (ie, noticeably)
faster?  Or is it just marketing hype?

Ian Porter

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