* Need opinions on high-volume SATA models *

  • Thread starter Thread starter JF Fortier
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JF Fortier

Hi,

I'm putting together the following computer :

MB : Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
CPU : AMD 3200+ 2GB
RAM : Corsair TWINX 2GB (2x1) Cas2
VID : Asus EN6600GT 128MB (TVO/SLI)
AUDIO : Echo Gina3G
HD 1 : WD Raptor 74GB SATA (10,000rpm)
HD 2 : Seagate Barracuda 200GB SATA (7,200rpm)
DVD: Plextor 716SA SATA
PSU: Antec 480W NeoPower
CASE : Antec P160

The Raptor will serve as the OS (C:) drive. The only question mark is the
2nd drive, which will be used to store docs (music, video, etc.)

The network administrator where I work tells me Seagate Barracudas, which he
recommends as they are eerily silent, support NCQ (N____ Command Queueing,
whatever that is) only at 250GB and up. 200GB models and lower, he claims,
do not. I don't know what NCQ is, but for the small price difference, I
originally opted for the 250GB... but the store has none in stock and
doesn't plan to have any for a bit. They recommended the 200GB, which they
have plenty of.

First question... is NCQ (Seagate SATA 250GB+) worth hunting down and
finding?

Next... I'm told by a competing store that they no longer carry Seagate SATA
drives *AT ALL* because they have a 50% return-rate on them. Apparently they
keep breaking. Naturally, the store I'm ordering my system from - which DOES
carry them - says they're great.

So my second question is... should I be looking at Seagate at all? Or is
there a significant leader in the 250GB range among Maxtor, Quantum or
Western Digital?

SCSI is out of my price range.

Thanks!
 
JF said:
Hi,

I'm putting together the following computer :

MB : Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
CPU : AMD 3200+ 2GB
RAM : Corsair TWINX 2GB (2x1) Cas2
VID : Asus EN6600GT 128MB (TVO/SLI)
AUDIO : Echo Gina3G
HD 1 : WD Raptor 74GB SATA (10,000rpm)
HD 2 : Seagate Barracuda 200GB SATA (7,200rpm)
DVD: Plextor 716SA SATA
PSU: Antec 480W NeoPower
CASE : Antec P160

The Raptor will serve as the OS (C:) drive. The only question mark is the
2nd drive, which will be used to store docs (music, video, etc.)

The network administrator where I work tells me Seagate Barracudas, which
he recommends as they are eerily silent, support NCQ (N____ Command
Queueing, whatever that is) only at 250GB and up. 200GB models and lower,
he claims, do not. I don't know what NCQ is, but for the small price
difference, I originally opted for the 250GB... but the store has none in
stock and doesn't plan to have any for a bit. They recommended the 200GB,
which they have plenty of.

First question... is NCQ (Seagate SATA 250GB+) worth hunting down and
finding?
Click to expand...

NCQ is not worth hunting down--first, you need a host adapter that supports
it, which most don't, and second the benefits in a single user machine are
marginal at best.
Next... I'm told by a competing store that they no longer carry Seagate
SATA drives *AT ALL* because they have a 50% return-rate on them.
Apparently they keep breaking. Naturally, the store I'm ordering my system
from - which DOES carry them - says they're great.
Click to expand...

I've not had any problem with them or seen any large number of complaints
about them anywhere--in any case they have the longest warranty in the
industry (5 years).

Seagate _did_ have a problem with Linux with some brands of host
adapter--Seagate implements SATA directly on the controller chip while
other manufacturers use a bridge chip that they buy from another
manufacturer--there was apparently enough leeway in the original SATA
specification to allow Seagate's interpretation to vary slightly from that
of the manufacturer of the bridge chip. This caused problems with the
early releases of the SATA drivers for Linux but that has since been
corrected.
So my second question is... should I be looking at Seagate at all? Or is
there a significant leader in the 250GB range among Maxtor, Quantum or
Western Digital?
Click to expand...

There is no Quantum--Quantum sold out to Maxtor several years ago. And IBM
sold out to Hitachi. And Samsungs work fine, tend to be quiet, and are
usually inexpensive.

If all you need is a big drive then go with whatever your local stores have
on sale. Personally unless all my PATA connectors were fully utilized or
my motherboard was old enough that the BIOS didn't support 48-bit LBA I'd
consider going with a PATA drive and saving a little money.
 
J. Clarke said:
NCQ is not worth hunting down--first, you need a host adapter that
supports
it, which most don't, and second the benefits in a single user machine are
marginal at best.
Click to expand...

Will the Asus A8N-SLI be able to take advantage of this NCQ technology?
 
JF said:
Will the Asus A8N-SLI be able to take advantage of this NCQ technology?
Click to expand...

I have no idea, but so far the only devices I know of that do are
purpose-made high-end RAID controllers.
 
According to JF Fortier said:
Will the Asus A8N-SLI be able to take advantage of this NCQ technology?
Click to expand...

The A8N-SLI Deluxe has 2 SATA controllers: 4 ports from the nForce4 chipset
and 4 ports from a Silicon Image 3114 on board. (The A8N-SLI non-deluxe has
no SiI3114 on board.) The nForce4 SATA ports support NCQ, but make sure you
use recent enough drivers from nVidia's web site as early drivers are
reported to corrupt data with NCQ on.

If your choice for Asus is not fixed, the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI looks better
on paper: IEEE 1394b instead of 1394a, the 2nd gigabit ethernet is connected
via PCIe rather than PCI. I have the A8N-SLI Deluxe and it is a nice board,
but I'd have probably got the gigabyte if it was available when I bought the
motherboard.

As for harddisk choice, you should look at the platter density as well. The
250GB+ Seagates with NCQ are 133GB/platter; the SATA 200GB that doesn't have
NCQ is probably the ST3200822AS which is 100GB/platter which translate to
lower sequencial read/write speeds and more seeks.

Stephen
 
NCQ is not worth hunting down--first, you need a host adapter that supports
it, which most don't, and second the benefits in a single user machine are
marginal at best.
Click to expand...

I saw an interesting quip in an advertisement by Seagate in a recent
trade magazine, along the lines of:

"Seagate's newest drives with NCQ have been proven to perform quicker
than a competitor's 10,000rpm hard drive."

Great marketing hype - the writer should apply for a job with Microsoft.


Odie
 
Odie said:
I saw an interesting quip in an advertisement by Seagate in a recent
trade magazine, along the lines of:

"Seagate's newest drives with NCQ have been proven to perform quicker
than a competitor's 10,000rpm hard drive."

Great marketing hype - the writer should apply for a job with Microsoft.
Click to expand...

I'm curios as to where they found a 10,000 RPM drive without command
queuing. The first generation Raptors didn't have it but the second
generation do, and the SCSI drives have all had it right along.
 
J. Clarke said:
I'm curios as to where they found a 10,000 RPM drive without command
queuing. The first generation Raptors didn't have it but the second
generation do, and the SCSI drives have all had it right along.
Click to expand...

Any way for me to make sure the Raptor I'm getting is 2nd Gen?
 
Eric said:
Perhaps you should spend less time reading magazines and more time on the
web.

It was the Fall 2003 IDF were SiI, Intel, and Seagate demoed SATA2 NCQ:
www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,1824%5E,00.html

Last year a hardware site benchmarked Seagate's 7200.8 with/without NCQ
against the Raptor, and Seagate's NCQ matched the Raptor with its inferior
ATA-4 command queuing.
Click to expand...
I don't actually spend all that much time reading magazines, you twit -
but I don't have a computer in my car, so when I'm waiting to pick my
children up from school / singing lessons / whatever, I find the trade
press quite an interesting way of passing the time.

I'm not even going to bother going to your link, as I have to think
about Christmas 2007, but from experience I suspect the testing would
have been limited to situations that would have benefited directly from
NCQ capability, rather than from what the average user would subject the
drive to.

No doubt you will spend hours trying to conjure up some sort of smarmy
response - but I would expect no less from you.


Odie
 
Odie Ferrous said:
I don't actually spend all that much time reading magazines, you twit -
but I don't have a computer in my car, so when I'm waiting to pick my
children up from school / singing lessons / whatever, I find the trade
press quite an interesting way of passing the time.

I'm not even going to bother going to your link, as I have to think
about Christmas 2007, but from experience I suspect the testing would
have been limited to situations that would have benefited directly from
NCQ capability, rather than from what the average user would subject the
drive to.

No doubt you will spend hours trying to conjure up some sort of smarmy
response - but I would expect no less from you.
Click to expand...
Typical idiotic response from a Troll. Care to explain why you had to snip
the stupid claim you made? ---
"Seagate's newest drives with NCQ have been proven to perform quicker
than a competitor's 10,000rpm hard drive."

Great marketing hype - the writer should apply for a job with Microsoft.
Click to expand...

Keep reading those trade mags, you don't want to have to think too much.
 
Eric said:
Typical idiotic response from a Troll. Care to explain why you had to snip
the stupid claim you made? ---
Click to expand...

Firtsly, to curtail the length of posts.

Secondly, because I am rather confused about this "stupid claim" I made;
all I mentioned was what I read in a magazine, the gist of which appears
below - unsnipped for your benefit. What claims am I making?


Previous post by myself:

I've been to your link on the Seagate site; I see nothing there that
suggests the Seagate NCQ performs better than the Western Digital
Raptor.

Hopwever, you didn't provide a link backing up your "Last year a
hardware site benchmarked Seagate's 7200.8 with/without NCQ
against the Raptor, and Seagate's NCQ matched the Raptor with its
inferior
ATA-4 command queuing." statement. Care to post one? I'll spare the
time to have a look.


Odie
 
JF said:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=271&devID_1=270&devCnt=2


According to this, the non-NCQ drive actually performed better.

After wondering if it was worth hunting down, now I'm wondering if it's
worth going out of my way to avoid.

Or did I read it wrong?
Click to expand...

Most likely the difference in performance in that benchmark had nothing to
do with NCQ. In earlier tests StorageReview has seen small changes in
performance between drives of the same model that the manufacturer
attributes to firmware revisions. Also, it's not clear what they did to
test with and without NCQ--if they used different host adapters that could
very easily bring about the difference you see in that review.

Just don't obsess about getting the last tiny increment of performance.
 
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=271&devID_1=270&devCnt=2
According to this, the non-NCQ drive actually performed better.
Click to expand...

In most benchmarks, yes.
After wondering if it was worth hunting down, now I'm wondering if it's
worth going out of my way to avoid.
Click to expand...

In the real world, on a single user system, I doubt you would notice any
difference. In fact, given the small difference in performance, I will even
go so far as to say you will _not_ notice a difference.
Or did I read it wrong?
Click to expand...

No, you read it correctly.

FWIW, and remember this is Usenet so you get what you pay for <g>, I'd go
with the Western Digital 2500JD. Explore storagereview.com and you'll see
why.
 
NCQ is supported by Intel's 915 and 925 chipsets and Nvidia'a nForce4. NCQ
disks, inc Maxtor DiamondMax 10, are faster than non NCQ, but the spin
speed, 10,000 vs 7,200rpm, has more of an effect. IOW, a 10,000rpm disk,
such as the Raptor, will likely be quicker than a 7,200rpm + NCQ disk.

The best speed boost is to combine NCQ with RAID, so a couple of the 200GB
Maxtors would do you a treat.

HTH
 
J. Clarke said:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=271&devID_1=270&devCnt=2

Most likely the difference in performance in that benchmark had nothing to
do with NCQ. In earlier tests StorageReview has seen small changes in
performance between drives of the same model that the manufacturer
attributes to firmware revisions.
Click to expand...
Also, it's not clear what they did to test with and without NCQ--
Click to expand...

Presumably they enabled queuing in the driver as no drive decides by itself
whether it will queue or not. The xxxxxx queued commands may impose a bigger
overhead on the protocol and allow less data per time unit to be transferred.
if they used different host adapters that could very easily
bring about the difference you see in that review.
Click to expand...

And since queuing involves the use of different commands and a mechanism
to keep track of the order of commands (tags) and the data that belongs
to them, that too may bring about the difference you see in that review.
Just don't obsess about getting the last tiny increment of performance.
Click to expand...

Or on loosing some when you can shut the feature off.
 
Chuck U. Farley said:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=271&devID_1=270&devCnt=2

In most benchmarks, yes.
Click to expand...

In the desktop suites.
It's almost the complete reverse for the server suite. And guess what, com-
mand queuing only works when there is something to queue, like with busy
servers that feed more I/O to the drive than it can service in real time so
commands do get queued and the drive get's the opportunity to reorder them
so that aggregated seektime can be minimized.
In the real world, on a single user system, I doubt you would notice any
difference. In fact, given the small difference in performance, I will even
go so far as to say you will _not_ notice a difference.
Click to expand...

And if you disable NCQ there shouldn't be any difference at all.
No, you read it correctly.
Click to expand...

For desktop use.
 
Odie Ferrous said:
Eric Gisin wrote:

Secondly, because I am rather confused about this "stupid claim" I made;
all I mentioned was what I read in a magazine, the gist of which appears
below - unsnipped for your benefit. What claims am I making?


Previous post by myself:


I've been to your link on the Seagate site; I see nothing there that
suggests the Seagate NCQ performs better than the Western Digital
Raptor.
Click to expand...
Try harder, from WinHEC 2004:
www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2102,00.html
Hopwever, you didn't provide a link backing up your "Last year a
hardware site benchmarked Seagate's 7200.8 with/without NCQ
against the Raptor, and Seagate's NCQ matched the Raptor with its
inferior
ATA-4 command queuing." statement. Care to post one? I'll spare the
time to have a look.
Click to expand...
The WinHEC public demo says Barracuda 7200.7 with NCQ beats Raptor.

A google of DiamondMax-10 or Barracuda-7200.8 with "NCQ benchmark" gives lots
of results:

http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/553/1&lp=nl_en
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=nl_en&trurl=http://www.tweakers
..net%2freviews%2f553%2f7

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/maxtor-diamondmax10/index.x?pg=1

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=ncq300&page=8&cookie_test=1

None meet the WinHEC claim, but they are within 20% of The Raptor 73GB IO/s.
 
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