Serial ATA

  • Thread starter Thread starter pheasant
  • Start date Start date
P

pheasant

Have been out of the build hobby for 3 years, going to put one together
soon, and wondering if serial hard drive offers any big advantage over
parallel other than ease of install and airflow.

Prices and specs seem pretty close to "regular" ones I've looked at.

Thanks for taking the time to save me a bunch of reading.

Mark
 
As I understand it there's not much differance at all in speed. SATA may
have interface transfer rates of 150MBps and appear better than ATA100 or
ATA133. The problem is hard drives can't perform that fast with a 7200rpm
drive performing an average transfer rate just over 40MBps which no where
near 150. Your better off with a faster rotation speed drive eg. 10,000rpm
for better performance. But I'd go for the SATA for the reasons you
mentioned if the prices are close.

An 8mb cache on the drive might also have a slight advantage on a SATA
interface for the initial burst.???

MT
 
As I understand it there's not much differance at all in speed. SATA may
have interface transfer rates of 150MBps and appear better than ATA100 or
ATA133. The problem is hard drives can't perform that fast with a 7200rpm
drive performing an average transfer rate just over 40MBps which no where
near 150. Your better off with a faster rotation speed drive eg. 10,000rpm
for better performance. But I'd go for the SATA for the reasons you
mentioned if the prices are close.

An 8mb cache on the drive might also have a slight advantage on a SATA
interface for the initial burst.???
Click to expand...

I disagree on the faster rotational speeds. My brother has a SATA RAID with
(2) Maxtor 80 MB 7200 drives with 8MB cache. His drives have, I believe, 80
MB platters. His benchmarks spank reference benchmarks with Raptor drives
in the same configuration. Raptor drives have low platter density, which is
a hinderence. The high platter density makes a huge difference, as does 8MB
cache.

Also, SATA drives come with 8MB cache too, so there isn't any real
difference. One of the big benefits is "future proofing" your purchase.
It's possible that at some point, PATA will be a dinosaur, but SATA drives
will still work with the MB's of the time. It's also possible that you
won't want what will then be a slower performing drive. It's also possible
that they'll be widely available adapters that let you run PATA drives on
SATA systems. Who knows...

The only thing that can achieve the speeds that ATA100 is capable of, let
alone SATA, are cache operations. Let's face it, with 8MB of cache flowing
through a stream that's capable of 100 MB/s or faster, the difference is
very, very minimal. The physical transfer rate of the drives themselves are
much lower.



--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
5:15pm up 40 days 2:00, 2 users, load average: 0.18, 0.29, 0.44

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...
 
pheasant said:
Have been out of the build hobby for 3 years, going to put one
together soon, and wondering if serial hard drive offers any big
advantage over parallel other than ease of install and airflow.
Click to expand...

"Ease of install and airflow" are just about the two biggest advantages of
SATA drives at the moment, alongside the fact that the interface should
theoretically have a longer lifespan than regular ATA drives. The cables are
much smaller and pinned so that they can only fit in the correct way, amking
installation a breeze. Remember however that each drive requires it's only
SATA channel, unlike existing IDE drives which can be doubled up on each
cable.

Performance differences are negligible at the moment, so I'd be going on
price.
 
They have 50% faster transfer rates than standard ATA 100 drives.
Click to expand...

Theoretically, yes. In reality, no. The drives' physical transfer rate is
the bottleneck. No drive on the market can do a sustained transfer of 100
MB/s, let alone 150 MB/s.



--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
9:16pm up 40 days 6:02, 2 users, load average: 0.20, 0.15, 0.10

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...
 
Back
Top