Move to SATA

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bernard Robinson
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Bernard Robinson

Greetings,
Currently I am running 2 WD800JB's in a Raid 0 configuration on a
Promise Fasttrak 100 which is mounted in a Abit TH7II. My new
motherboard an Asus P4C800-E has 2 sets of SATA headers. One controlled
by the Promise PDC20378 controller and the other by the Intel ICH5
controller. My questions are as follows.

1.I am considering SATA to IDE adapters for the WD800JB's. The SIIG SC-
SATA12 and the Highpoint Rockethead 100's any opinion on which is best?

2.What are the odds that I will be able to migrate my current array over
to either the PDC20378 or the ICH5 controller intact.

3.Which of the controllers would theoretically offer the best
performance.

Thank you for you kind consideration,

Bernie
 
I'm interested in any responses you get. I'm thinking I'd like to go SATA
just to clean up my drive cabling, as I have 5 ATA hard drives plus a CDRW
and a DVDRW. But it seems too early and I may just wait until I get a new
system. The SATA adapters don't seem to common and a little expensive just
to clean up cabling. Then again, round cables are a litte expensive too.

As far as controllers go, if you want something really good consider 3Ware.
Otherwise, either controller will probably be about the same, one might
have a bit lower cpu usage than the other. I might suspect the Intel
driver might get wider driver support under various OS than the Promise
controller. Sometimes it takes a while for Promise to get a fixed driver
for an OS... I had to wait a while for Server 2003 on a TX133 card, there
was a bug in the one that came with it.
 
I'm interested in any responses you get. I'm thinking I'd like to go SATA
just to clean up my drive cabling, as I have 5 ATA hard drives plus a CDRW
and a DVDRW. But it seems too early and I may just wait until I get a new
system. The SATA adapters don't seem to common and a little expensive just
to clean up cabling. Then again, round cables are a litte expensive too.
Click to expand...

Why move to SATA when you can use SCSI U320 or Fibre? It really sounds like
you have a squirrels nest of wires in that box. Go SCSI and never look
back.



Rita
 
Way, way too expensive for my needs and almost no performance benefit
to my setup, where the bottleneck is the drive. I used to have
all-scsi systems and have totally dropped it, just not meaningfull for
a home system. Also, noise and heat is a concern for my home system,
and there's no way I'd go for 10 or 15K rpm scsi drives.

If I had the coin, I'd to a SATA RAID array though, and use SCSI or
Fiber fabric if I had fast enough drives that a SATA connection
bottlenecked. In fact many of the SATA and ATA external arrays are
delivered in just this way.

My opintion, SATA is going to make it easy to deliver 1TB storage in
the home PC, and the home PC needs capacity more than it needs
speed... operating at speeds that you would consider "near-line" level
performance in a server environment is perfectly acceptable on PCs.
Sustained loads from multiple users or apps usually isn't an issue on
the home PC, even if it is serving up media (video, music, etc).
Click to expand...

If you check the archives you'll find that Rita's solution to every
problem is SCSI. I suspect that she'd recommend it if one asked her
what time it was.
 
Way, way too expensive for my needs and almost no performance benefit to my
setup, where the bottleneck is the drive. I used to have all-scsi systems
and have totally dropped it, just not meaningfull for a home system. Also,
noise and heat is a concern for my home system, and there's no way I'd go
for 10 or 15K rpm scsi drives.

If I had the coin, I'd to a SATA RAID array though, and use SCSI or Fiber
fabric if I had fast enough drives that a SATA connection bottlenecked. In
fact many of the SATA and ATA external arrays are delivered in just this
way.

My opintion, SATA is going to make it easy to deliver 1TB storage in the
home PC, and the home PC needs capacity more than it needs speed...
operating at speeds that you would consider "near-line" level performance
in a server environment is perfectly acceptable on PCs. Sustained loads
from multiple users or apps usually isn't an issue on the home PC, even if
it is serving up media (video, music, etc).
 
An AI marketing program run amok?

Seriously though, I don't blame her for her efforts. I used to be the same
way about SCSI many years ago, say prior to 98/99. But back then the
performance and size differences between SCSI and IDE were so dramatic that
the price was worth it to at least some professional workstation users.
For example you could get SCSI drives 5x the size of the biggest IDE, with
much more cache. That simply isn't true any longer and the performance
difference has continued to shrink.

Not that I don't wish we all used SCSI. I know the technical and practical
benefits. The industry could have easily made SCSI as cheap and as
standard in motherboards as Firewire or USB. But the industry likes to
keep certain technologies segregated to "server class" machines, things
like SCSI and SMP, so that they can continue to charge a premium for them
in those markets.

I think it's great that we are seeing ATA / SATA enter the server market
and bring prices down. It's having a much bigger impact than having SCSI
in the home market might make.
 
Mr. Grinch said:
An AI marketing program run amok?
Click to expand...

I don't think that intelligence has anything to do with it.
Seriously though, I don't blame her for her efforts.
I used to be the same way about SCSI many years ago, say prior to 98/99.
Click to expand...
Then you obviously don't know the Berkowitz troll.
But back then the
performance and size differences between SCSI and IDE were so dramatic that
the price was worth it to at least some professional workstation users.
For example you could get SCSI drives 5x the size of the biggest IDE, with
much more cache. That simply isn't true any longer and the performance
difference has continued to shrink.

Not that I don't wish we all used SCSI. I know the technical and practical
benefits. The industry could have easily made SCSI as cheap and as
standard in motherboards as Firewire or USB. But the industry likes to
keep certain technologies segregated to "server class" machines, things
like SCSI and SMP, so that they can continue to charge a premium for
them in those markets.

I think it's great that we are seeing ATA / SATA enter the server market
and bring prices down.
Click to expand...

Then let's hope SATA keeps SAS affordable too so we still can have SCSI.
 
I don't think that intelligence has anything to do with it.

Then you obviously don't know the Berkowitz troll.
Click to expand...

Nope but I recognized the Chris "you're running an IBM smear campaign"
troll and I hadn't seen that one in years. Posting the exact same form
letter to anyone to says anything about an IBM drive. Wow. It makes me
think at least SOME of the responses on USENET are from automated programs.
Then let's hope SATA keeps SAS affordable too so we still can have
SCSI.
Click to expand...

It's possible. As long as we have SANs I think it's safe to say there will
always be more expensive versions based on SCSI, be it parallel or fiber.
The fabric used to get it to your server is another matter, it's getting
wider all the time, from the older FCAL and multi Gbit switched stuff ie
brocade to accelerated iSCSI cards over 10Gbit ethernet, there's a lot to
choose from.
 
Nope but I recognized the Chris "you're running an IBM smear campaign"
troll and I hadn't seen that one in years. Posting the exact same form
letter to anyone to says anything about an IBM drive. Wow. It makes me
think at least SOME of the responses on USENET are from automated programs.
Click to expand...
It's SCSI time folks. Of course they think I'm a troll since the very same
people accusing me of trolling were caught to be trolling themselves. Good
old Rod(less) with his many personalities has also been pinched. You see,
when I caught them in their lies they just couldn't fess up and "take it"
like a man, so they try to attack me. I just ignore these twits, as they
add little value to this group.

Rita
 
Mr. Grinch said:
Nope but I recognized the Chris "you're running an IBM smear campaign"
troll and I hadn't seen that one in years.
Click to expand...

Obviously you haven't noticed the return of Ron R.
Posting the exact same form letter to anyone to says anything about an
IBM drive.
Click to expand...

Ron is back, where has your humor gone suddenly?
Wow. It makes me think at least SOME of the responses on USENET
are from automated programs.
Click to expand...

Aah, you meant the Rodney AI that has copied itself a few times and (also)
posts under several aliases.
It's possible. As long as we have SANs I think it's safe to say there will
always be more expensive versions based on SCSI, be it parallel or fiber.
Click to expand...

SAS is serial, not fiber.
 
I'm interested in any responses you get. I'm thinking I'd like to go SATA
just to clean up my drive cabling, as I have 5 ATA hard drives
Click to expand...

I bet that's a noisy setup. I went to a mobile rack so I can run as
many OS's as I want and only have to have one HD running at a time.
Cuts down on the noise pollution considerably.
 
Not that I don't wish we all used SCSI. I know the technical and practical
benefits. The industry could have easily made SCSI as cheap and as
standard in motherboards as Firewire or USB. But the industry likes to
keep certain technologies segregated to "server class" machines, things
like SCSI and SMP, so that they can continue to charge a premium for them
in those markets.
Click to expand...

Mac's used to use SCSI exclusively. They don't now though.
 
You know, it IS a noisy setup, but the drives weren't the worst offenders.

The case has a lot of fans. I've got two intake fans in front, one of them
in front of the hard drives, one below. I've got two exhaust fans behind
the cpus. There is a fan on each of the cpus, one on the video card, plus
the power supply.

I replaced the case fans with ball bearing fans but it didn't help much.
Then I got some Panaflow ultra quiet medium speed fans. These are MUCH
better. I'm wishing I'd gotten the low speed versions, because with 4 fans
I don't think I need to move that much air. The next noisiest fans are the
cpu fans and I'm not going to bother with them, they are OEM P3s with heat
sinks riveted on.

As far as shutting drives down, isn't there software that will let you spin
down individual drives? I know Adaptec Easy SCSI used to do this.


Thanks for the reply.

My next case will be the Antec Sonata, designed for quiet, has special
drive bays with rubber mounts. I'll have one fast drive for the OS and
apps, and use 300GB / 5400 rpm drives for the remainder of my storage
needs. I'm quite happy using a Maxtor 160GB 5400 rpm drive for my MP3s and
MST3K videos. I have the 7200 rpm version as well from Costco because it
was so cheap and I needed space at the time. The IBM GXP 22GB run the
hotest, but prir to that I had a Seagate Medalist 7200 rpm 9GB and that ran
extremely hot, one of their first 7200 rpm ATA drives, back from 1998.

I tried to clean things up with round cables but it really wasn't much
better so I went back to ribbon cables. I also was concerned about error
rates for long (36") round cables as I was seeing some unusual pauses on
drive access which are now gone.

It would be nice to go all SATA at some point just to clean up the cabling
and improve the airflow. Right now I have it set up for front bottom
intake to top rear exhaust but the drive cabling gets in the way.
 
Folkert said:
SAS is serial, not fiber.
Click to expand...


Hello, Folkert:

Uh, and "fiber" is actually "fibre" [Fibre Channel (FC), to be precise],
for your information. This latter spelling reflects the technology's
European heritage, incidentally.

C'mon, Folksy, you didn't need a "Turcowitz" (such as myself) to tell
you that! :-D


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>
 
You know, it IS a noisy setup, but the drives weren't the worst offenders.

The case has a lot of fans. I've got two intake fans in front, one of them
in front of the hard drives, one below. I've got two exhaust fans behind
the cpus. There is a fan on each of the cpus, one on the video card, plus
the power supply.

I replaced the case fans with ball bearing fans but it didn't help much.
Then I got some Panaflow ultra quiet medium speed fans. These are MUCH
better. I'm wishing I'd gotten the low speed versions, because with 4 fans
I don't think I need to move that much air.
Click to expand...

Get some Fanmates from Zalman. They cut the voltage to 5v so they run
at about half the rpm. I use one on the front fan but when I used one
on a Vantec Stealth fan the thing was hardly turning so took it off.

As far as shutting drives down, isn't there software that will let you spin
down individual drives? I know Adaptec Easy SCSI used to do this.
Click to expand...

I looked for something like that and came up empty. I see there is Mac
software available that can do this but I couldn't find any PC
software that does the same. The stuff built into Windows is no good
because it controls all the drives and is not selectable for each
drive.

I have this one older Maxtor drive that is too noisy and have found
the Mobile rack is preferable to using more than one drive at once.
Plus the casing for the rack helps insulate the noise. I've put the
Maxtor in a second PC I'm building for now and am looking to get a
120gb Seagate Barracuda or one of those Samsung drives that are
supposed to be quiet.

Powersupplies can be a noise nuisance too and I bought one of those
Zalman 400w's to cut that back. But the Sonata case you are getting
already comes with a 380w quiet PSU.
 
I tried to clean things up with round cables but it really wasn't much
better so I went back to ribbon cables. I also was concerned about error
rates for long (36") round cables as I was seeing some unusual pauses on
drive access which are now gone.
Click to expand...

Ooh yea, 36" is way too long. 18" is supposed to be the max standard
for HDD's. But *good quality* 24" cables are ok too.
 
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