Thanks Nick / Hugo, that was about what I thought. So the difference seems to be about this:
* > thinner cables/more air flow? A normal and decent desktop case should not have problems with cooling. It didn't in the past, it shouldn't have now. Perhaps in a micro-ATX case this becomes an issue, but one can fold up ribbon cables a little. * Maximum cable length is longer This isn't an issue in any desktop or mid-tower case. I've seen one badly designed mobo where the IDE conncetors were located on the opposite side of where the drives would be, but my solution would be to buy well in the first place than to throw more good money after bad hardware. * dirves may be cheaper than parallel ones in 5 years * Tidier looking cables inside Put the lid on mate, and don't fiddle with things which weren't meant for your eyes... ;) * But ribbon looks really ugly in my blue-light side-window case Not my problem, I won't pay for sex..y-looking extranous cr*p. [oops, scribe: scratch that last point] Hmm. Seems like not much for the about 20% extra cost and a pile of potential trouble. Ah, here's Delio with a real reason: * hot-swappable (in theory) I like this, even more once I have a use for it. This reminds me, where is it... http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-users%40it.canterbury.ac.nz/msg28079.html * get more IDE channels on the same mobo Yes, useful. > I don't know for a fact where the holdups in ATA are, maybe the > identical drive can deliver faster through a different interface UDMA133 is already much faster than the sustained data rate from a 7200rpm consumer-level IDE drive, which is said to be around UDMA66. Obviously this is highly dependent on head position and usage patterns at the time, but it was argued that UDM133 buys practically nothing over UDMA100. The drive's cache levels much of this. > And they might not work well > in Linux depending on your BIOS (see my thread called: Re: Ubuntu > install failed - CD drive not supported!!) You mean your CD-ROM is SATA? That's asking for trouble, though as you say one distro works, so it's not a Linux problem. > I think that most SATA capable mobos also have built in RAID. Yes, unfortunately. For Linux, you don't want that raid rubbish. It's just in the way causing trouble. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
