Question : Problem: #500##  Is it best to have SATA as the system drive or the data drive when used with an IDE drive.

Last week my system IDE drive died.

I had a 40 gig system drive and an 80 gig data drive.

I have bought a SATA drive and was wandering what to do with it.

The computer is set up to run ONLY as a music making PC running windows XP pro sP2, Cubase SX 3 and my EMU geneerator X sound card / sampler.

The sound card / sampler documentation suggests that running the data (samples) off a seperate drive will speed up the sampler as it can stream samples from this drive quicker.

I'm thinking that the SATA would be perfect for this... I imagine that once the programs (cubase etc) have loaded then the IDE drive isn't actually used that much and the extra speed out loading / running progs is outwighed by the speed of datastreaming from the SATA drive.

Is this the case?  What are yuor suggestions?

Answer : Problem: #500##  Is it best to have SATA as the system drive or the data drive when used with an IDE drive.

Yes, SATA 2 has a greater bus speed. The regular SATA drive is practicly just slightly faster that regular PATA drive.

When it comes to performance and your current computer is that if you have to add a SATA card into it the SATA performance might be slower because you utilize a regular PCI slot to connect to a drive.

I have seen quite serious performance problems in such settings.

PCI-X, PCIe slots/cards improve the performance quite a lot but you might end up upgrading your motherboard to fully utilize the speed increase on SATA (2) drives