External Enclosure - IDE/ATA or SATA?

[FanOfMac]

Fellow forumites:

I have a little dilemma. Here goes. I am looking to purchase a two hard drive RAID enclosure. There are two options that I am looking at as follows:

1. OWC Mercury Elite-AL 800 Pro RAID FireWire 800 1394B Dual-Drive Enclosure Kit for up to Two IDE/ATA Hard Disk Drives.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW912AL2/

OR

2. OWC Mercury Elite-AL FireWire 800/400 + USB2 Pro Hardware RAID Dual-Drive Enclosure Kit for up to Two SATA Hard Disk Drives.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW924AL2K/


Choice #1 is for IDE/ATA drives. This might be nice since I already have a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda IDE drive for this. So, I would only need to purchase one more drive. Plus this enclosure has hardware RAID 1 (mirroring).

Choice #2 is for SATA drives. This option would require that I purchase two more drives. Also, it lacks hardware RAID 1 (mirroring), though it can be implemented at software level.

Question: Considering IDE/ATA drives are older technology, does it make sense to purchase a IDE/ATA drive for 'choice #1'? Or is the SATA option in 'choice #2' really better?

Thanks in advance for your consideration and opinions.

FanOfMac

 

[pastrychef]

I would personally not invest in any more PATA drives at this point... Just my opinion...

 

[techound1]

I would personally not invest in any more PATA drives at this point... Just my opinion...

Agreed. The IDE has resale value now, so I'd sell it off. In a year, it's going to be hard to get the recycler to take it (okay, so that's a gross exaggeration , but you get the idea).

 

[FanOfMac]

Check Out $189.99 1 TB Seagate Barracuda Drives

Thanks pastrychef and techound1!! I appreciate your thoughts. I've decided to go with SATA 3.0 for my new drives; I just picked up two 1 TB Seagate Barracuda drives from Bestbuy for $189.99 each; they just went on sale today. I will keep my Seagate Barracuda 500 GB IDE drive in a separate enclosure for my Time Machine backups. The drive is a year old and runs great, so can not see selling it.