Three months ago I bought a new computer, had my old files on the IDE drive transferred to the SATA Hard Disk.

Three months later the SATA, under warranty, crashes. All my data gone -- years of work wiped out forever.

Now I wonder if SATA is better than my IDE hard disk which has endured low voltage and sudden power outages.

If SATA, it seems, needs perfect environment to survive, otherwise you will lose all your precious data with SATA.

Anon , ,

There are a lot of assumptions and (dare I say) mistakes there?

SATA hard disks are physically the same as PATA (what we used to call IDE) disks. The only difference is the electronics that connects the PC to the disk. One is serial and the other is parallel. (They're both IDE or Integral Drive Electronics.)

Regardless of the disk type in your computer, if you don't regularly back up your files to another medium, any loss of data is your own fault. ALL hard disks will fail eventually.

If you data is that valuable, there are places that will recover it for you. It costs a lot but it may be worth it.

The warranty will cover the replacement of the dead disk, but not recovery of the data.

If you're an experimenter, it may be possible to resurrect the old disk. Since the fault is possibly in the electronics, some experimenters have found that if they get an identical disk and swap the electronics to the dead disk, it will work.

Paul Zucker