Mixing SATA and IDE Hard Drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter GKenney
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GKenney

Hi all,

I have an ASUS P4C800 MB with an Intel 3.2g processor. When I upgraded my
system I had a 120g Western Digital HD (7200RPM) so I did not put in a new
drive.

I'm doing more and more video editing and would like to add a second hard
drive. I know I can buy the exact same drive and add it. But could I get a
120g SATA drive and have the two of them co-exist?

Thanks for any help here
 
yes - mix and match to your hearts content. I have 2 PATA and 2 SATA drives
in the same MB/CPUS system.
 
HAve fun. I have 2 pata 80gigs & 1 sata 160 gig living in harmony
without using extra drivers.

I find that the pata drives are faster and use one for my C
partition. This is likely due to the interface on the sata drives
being less efficient than pata's at this time. By the way all my
drives are WD's. You should get similar results with maxtor.

WD raptors are another breed unfortunately budget constraints are
stopping me from trying them out.

Locust
 
I thought SATA Drives were faster?

I sure hope they are on my A7N8X-E. Been waiting a long time to get a pair...
 
LooseNut said:
I thought SATA Drives were faster?
Click to expand...

I am finding that the peak read/write speeds for
SATA drives are virtually always a lot lower than
the burst mode speeds for PATA drives.

However, the average read/write speeds are significantly
higher with SATA. When you are copying a few gigs of
data from one SATA drive to another the job takes about
16% to 18% less time than doing the same thing with a couple
of PATA drives. If the two PATA drives are on the same
controller they do even worse.

Not that I have a huge statistically valid data sampling yet,
either. I've only used exactly 16 SATA drives so far.
 
LooseNut said:
I thought SATA Drives were faster?
Click to expand...

Why? OK so SATA has a theoretical peak transfer speed of 150MB/s, but then
your PCI bus can't do that, and most drives can;t get more than a few
microseconds of data across at peak speeds anyway. P-ATA is up to 133MB/s

What limits the speed of a drive is the rotational latency, and track seek
times. I have never come across a drive that is limited by the interface it
uses, it is ALWAYS limited by the mechanics.
I sure hope they are on my A7N8X-E. Been waiting a long time to get a
pair...
Click to expand...


If you were to get, for example, a WD2500JD and a WD2500JB, they would
perform about the same, since they are the same drive. The difference is
the interface. In the JD there is actually a PATA to SATA bridge chip -
somewhere for additional latency and throughput to be reduced. However,
this pales into insignificance when compared to the latency and data
transfer speeds from the platter to the drive controller.

My WD360GD (Raptor) is damn fast, but thats 'cos it's a 10K RPM drive. My
WD2500JD is pretty good in terms of sustained read rates - comparable to the
Raptor, in fact. It can't touch it on writing or seeking though, the Raptor
is in a different league (hence the price).

Benchmark Results (WD360GD / WD2500JD) using HDTach 2.70:
Seek: 8.8 / 13.8ms
Peak Transfer (useless measure): 99.7 / 75.4 MB/s
Max Transfer: 60.2 / 60.4
Average Transfer: 50.5 / 50.6
Min Transfer: 36.2 / 34.6

So as you can see, pretty much the same for read speeds.

However, the write speeds for the WD2500JD are almost exactly half the read
speeds. For the Raptor, they're about the same as the read speeds, as far
as I can tell (it's my OS drive, so couldn't test writing as it had to be
unpartitioned)

And in terms of dealing with lots of seeking (accessing directories with
thousands of files, deleting directories with hundreds of files, and just
general usage) the Raptor wipes the floor with the WD2500JD.

Ben
 
Ben Pope said:
Why? OK so SATA has a theoretical peak transfer speed of 150MB/s, but then
your PCI bus can't do that, and most drives can;t get more than a few
microseconds of data across at peak speeds anyway. P-ATA is up to 133MB/s

What limits the speed of a drive is the rotational latency, and track seek
times. I have never come across a drive that is limited by the interface it
uses, it is ALWAYS limited by the mechanics.



If you were to get, for example, a WD2500JD and a WD2500JB, they would
perform about the same, since they are the same drive. The difference is
the interface. In the JD there is actually a PATA to SATA bridge chip -
somewhere for additional latency and throughput to be reduced. However,
this pales into insignificance when compared to the latency and data
transfer speeds from the platter to the drive controller.

My WD360GD (Raptor) is damn fast, but thats 'cos it's a 10K RPM drive. My
WD2500JD is pretty good in terms of sustained read rates - comparable to the
Raptor, in fact. It can't touch it on writing or seeking though, the Raptor
is in a different league (hence the price).

Benchmark Results (WD360GD / WD2500JD) using HDTach 2.70:
Seek: 8.8 / 13.8ms
Peak Transfer (useless measure): 99.7 / 75.4 MB/s
Max Transfer: 60.2 / 60.4
Average Transfer: 50.5 / 50.6
Min Transfer: 36.2 / 34.6

So as you can see, pretty much the same for read speeds.

However, the write speeds for the WD2500JD are almost exactly half the read
speeds. For the Raptor, they're about the same as the read speeds, as far
as I can tell (it's my OS drive, so couldn't test writing as it had to be
unpartitioned)

And in terms of dealing with lots of seeking (accessing directories with
thousands of files, deleting directories with hundreds of files, and just
general usage) the Raptor wipes the floor with the WD2500JD.

Ben
--
Click to expand...

And is not the 72Gb Raptor meant to be an improvement on the 36Gb one - not
just double the capacity.
 
Doug said:
And is not the 72Gb Raptor meant to be an improvement on the 36Gb one -
not just double the capacity.
Click to expand...

Yes, it has Tagged Command Queuing and an optimised firmware. As I
understand it, it is pretty much an improvement all round. Benchmarks are
somewhat better if I recall.

Ben
 
Ben Pope said:
Yes, it has Tagged Command Queuing and an optimised firmware. As I
understand it, it is pretty much an improvement all round. Benchmarks are
somewhat better if I recall.

Ben
--
Click to expand...

Thought so. Pity about the price. :(
 
This has turned out to be an interesting discussion.

If I might add my results between a a pata and sata drive are as
follows (this using sisoft sandra 2004 & visual observations)

- Sustained tranfer rate for a WD 80 gig 8meg cache PATA drive 43
meg/sec
-Sustained tranfer rate for a WD 160 gig 8meg cache SATA drive 34
meg/sec

The C (booting partiton) was tried on both drives, the PATA drive
would boot up faster, visibly.

As far as I know the WD SATA drive uses a pata to sata bridge and not
a native sata interface thus reducing the transfer speed due to
overhead.

my 2 cents

Locust
 
end said:
This has turned out to be an interesting discussion.

If I might add my results between a a pata and sata drive are as
follows (this using sisoft sandra 2004 & visual observations)

- Sustained tranfer rate for a WD 80 gig 8meg cache PATA drive 43
meg/sec
-Sustained tranfer rate for a WD 160 gig 8meg cache SATA drive 34
meg/sec

The C (booting partiton) was tried on both drives, the PATA drive
would boot up faster, visibly.

As far as I know the WD SATA drive uses a pata to sata bridge and not
a native sata interface thus reducing the transfer speed due to
overhead.
Click to expand...

Not usually as much as that though.

What SATA controller and drivers are you using? Do you have a P4P800 - that
would be either the ICH5 or the Promise, right?

Ben
 
Not usually as much as that though.

What SATA controller and drivers are you using? Do you have a P4P800 - that
would be either the ICH5 or the Promise, right?

Ben
Click to expand...


It's a p4p800dlx with (I believe) a ICH5 (definately not a promise
controller).

I expected the sata would be faster and was disappointed but it makes
a very good storage drive. No drivers were loaded for the sata drive.
The C partition was copied over to the sata drive using Drive image
2002 and no driver were required.

Locust
 
I did find one oddity with an SATA drive. I have a WinTV-Go for video
capturing. It works great capturing to a PATA drive but I get horizontal
lines when using the SATA. It's a WD 7200 rpm 80 GB but I don't think the
drive is the problem. It'd the video signal that gets corrupted, not the
data to the drive. This probably won't apply to newer capture cards but if
you do have problems, try capturing to the PATA drive.

Chris
 
I did find one oddity with an SATA drive. I have a WinTV-Go for video
capturing. It works great capturing to a PATA drive but I get horizontal
lines when using the SATA. It's a WD 7200 rpm 80 GB but I don't think the
drive is the problem. It'd the video signal that gets corrupted, not the
data to the drive. This probably won't apply to newer capture cards but if
you do have problems, try capturing to the PATA drive.

Chris
Click to expand...


LOL. Sounds like more buggy sleeper digital rights technology oozing
into things.
 
end said:
It's a p4p800dlx with (I believe) a ICH5 (definately not a promise
controller).
Click to expand...

OK, so there's an ICH5R in the chipset and an additional VIA VIA6410 ATA
controller.

The ICH5R is the only one to support SATA.
I expected the sata would be faster and was disappointed but it makes
a very good storage drive. No drivers were loaded for the sata drive.
The C partition was copied over to the sata drive using Drive image
2002 and no driver were required.
Click to expand...


There will be a driver required for the Intel ATA/SATA controller, but
Windows may have it already.

Ben
 
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