Anyone familiar with PATA drives (sea gates - could put into any case): are they mac friendly?

I just went ahead and purchased an OWC eSATA/FW/USB2 external drive. Not long AFTERWARD, a friend sent me a link about this PATA Seagate deal that sounds great. But what the heck is PATA, and is it Mac/FCP friendly?


Here's the link:


[shop2.outpost.com]



And here's some of their info:

SEAGATE 400GB PATA ST3400632A-RK
Seagate 3.5" PATA Internal Hard Drive:
FRYS.com #: 4596287
PERPENDICULAR RECORDING TECHNOLOGY
UDMA/100 INTERFACE
7200 RPM
16MB BUFFER
RETAIL BOXED HARD DRIVE (INSTALLATION KIT INCLUDED)
5 YEAR WARRANTY

As usual, anecdotes and relevent info welcome. C'mon. peops, how about some anecdotes?

Marla

PATA is Parallel ATA don't use as its old technology and won't give you as good performance as SATA

SATA transmits less data per clock cycle than PATA, the simpler electrical design allows for much higher clock speeds and therefore greather bandwidth. The current SATA spec gives a bandwidth of 150MB/s or SATA II which gives 300MB/s a huge improvement over 133MB/s Parallel ATA.

PATA is really only used nowadays for optical devices like CD/DVD drives.

They might be cheap drives and will be fine for DV work but I would avoid as you'll appreciate the read/write times of a SATA drive, improving your workflow speed for importing and scrubbing the timeline and saving and exporting files.

Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Oh yeah and...

Also the ones you have pointed out are only ATA100 they are REALLLLLLLLLLY slow PATA drives...

Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Thanks Ben!

At the moment I am only abloe to use FW 400 at home. But it's nice to have a drive that will do the trick once I upgrade my system and/or get a new one. But do you think those PATA seagates might be good for back up media drives?

Marla

All Firewire external enclosures use PATA drives. ATA-100 is fast enough for 400-800Gbps through a bridge board.

Your OWC drive has a PATA internal drive inside it. Seagates only produce ATA-100 drives and OWC ships either Seagate or Hitachi drives in their enclosures, they tell me.

""But do you think those PATA seagates might be good for back up media drives?""

You would need to also put that drive inside a Firewire enclosure to use it. Another trick that is interesting , is that lots of drives now are coming with a 5 year warranty and if vendors put them inside one of their enclosures, they ony give a one or two year warranty.

That's why I choose to build my own Firewire drives.

Actually Jon not all FW external enclosures use PATA.

The G-Tech ones use SATA as do a number of other professional HDD video solutions.

Also Segate produce a whole range of ATA, SATA and SATA II HDDs and Hitachi do the same and most come with a 5 year warranty as you said.

As I said before PATA is fine for DV and at a push 8-bit uncompressed (via FW800) video using a good PATA to FW (or other interface) enclosure. It is also good for a cheap HDD backup.


But Marla...

I personally think if you are considering about using it with a new system, you'd be better getting a SATA or SATA II HDD with an eSATA/FW enclosure that you could pop into your new system internally (should you wish) such as the new MacPros. Where as you wouldn't easily be able to put in a PATA unless you use the second ATA interface in the optical bay.

Yes they'll be slightly more expensive but the performance will be better.

I think you can find a 400GB SATA for about $110ish (I've seen them for $112 but you'll need to google/froogle it)

You'd be surprised at how annoying performance drops can be when you are trying to do something on time or in a hurry.

Ben

Anyway thats my $89.95s worth



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]