Serial ATA hard drive

[WhiskeyBullets]

I noticed since Armed Assault Streams the island from your hard drive, I have seen quicker load times and overall better game play from a friend of mine computers who's only difference is his hard drive being a SATA 3.0. The higher 3.0 Gbit/s seems to make a world of difference.

The rig he has is the following:

P4 2.8 Single Core
9600XT AGP Video Card
SATA 3.0 Hard Drive

His Armed Assault Perfromance is Amazing as far as Ingame.
Go Figure

[5133p39]

I can say only that i recently got new S3 hdd, and i see no difference when playing ArmA, it's just the same as with my old ATA (or PATA if you like).
(my config is Athlon 64 3500+, 3GB RAM, gf 7900 extreme)

...i just wanted to say - the performance depends on the HW (and of course, how optimized and stable is your OS), and i mean the HW as a whole, i mean each component, not ONLY the HDD.

[450R]

There still isn't a single drive that can saturate an ATA-133 line so I'm afraid going to SATA won't bring any improvements on its own. His HDD may be faster overall simply because it's a new generation.

I wouldn't be surprised if half of the people playing ArmA have their drives running in PIO mode and don't even know it. With data streaming that could be a huge bottleneck.

[WhiskeyBullets]

maybe they can check theres by doing the following

Change modes in Device Manager.
1. Load devmgmt.msc
2. Select IDE ATA/ATAPI Devices
3. Select Properties of Primary IDE Controller
4. Click on Advanced Settings.
5. It should show current setting and option to change setting from a pull down list
6. change setting, close dev manager and reboot.

[S.O.S]

A SATA drive is basicly a normal ATA drive just with a different connector.

Advantages of SATA are:

-higher data transfairrates between CPU and Harddrive
-more comfortable and easier cable management
-hot plugging

In practice the SATA and the ATA drives are physically the same when we talk about their effective speed.

When you buy a new harddrive you should better watch for the best access time's and latency's (spins per minute) - only these are relvant for the actuall data transfair rate.