First Generation Serial ATA drive

You may ask what is a first generation serial ATA drive?

Nowadays, Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drive been used through out the world widely and most of the motherboard or mobo is develop with JUST SATA ports instead of IDE ports for our system storage.

Back to the topic, the most common type of SATA which the users used currently would probably be SATA1 or SATA2.

SATA1 : Known as first generation Serial ATA drive which having 1.5Gbit/s, which means the drive having 1500MHz frequency and with the real speed of 150MB/s.

SATA2: Known as second generation Serial ATA drive which having 3.0Gbit/s, which means the drive having 3000MHz frequency and with the real speed of 300MB/s.

We will look into SATA1 by comparing the drive with different brand which is Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital.

From the table above, I did some comparison for the 3 brands and all of them are very similar. The only real differences between the drive is their storage capacity. This is caused from the platter size of the drive which you can see from the table. The higher the platter size, the higher the inherent transfers speeds should be.

So Maxtor currently is using the highest capacity size compare to the other 2 which giving maxtor having higher performance. Although Seagate having their latest model of hard drive called “Barracuda V”, but they are still using an older 60GB platter. As for Western Digital, although it is still using the oldest platter 40Gb size so overall its performance should be less than the newer drives, but its performance has always been strong.

The biggest thing to note is the warranties. Most manufactures have reduces their warranties to one year to cut costs. But most IDE hard drive probably remain as 3 years warranty compare to Serial ATA.