Time Wasters: Serial ATA Won't Save You Time Yet
One hard-drive option that I won't jump for is a Serial ATA hard disk or controller. Serial ATA's 150 megabytes-per-second data rate is slightly higher than that of widely deployed ATA-133 drives (133 MBps). But let's be realistic. No mainstream drive comes close to flooding even an older ATA-100 connection: The bottleneck is in the disk heads and platters. Serial ATA certainly offers a more compact, manageable, and flexible connection between the drive and the controller, but from a time-saving standpoint, you'll never recoup the effort you expend installing a Serial ATA card.
Michael Desmond
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