Worth the upgrade?

[Ben Pope]

Please... try Raid0 on SATA150 (SiliconImage, just to name a popular
choice) and we can talk. No need to buy 3Ware, no, SiliconImage is enough

I have no great desire to try RAID 0. I have an A7N8X Deluxe with the SiI
3112A.

Pleaaaseeeee... As I said, in everyday use, it's a difference like between
the day and the night
Rubbish!

And, bien sur, u have to configure the drive in Raid0 mode. But also drive
against drive, I mean single ATA133 against single SATA150 drive make a
relevant difference in every day use.

Which drives are you comparing?

And it's just stupid in this days buy ATA and not SATA, also if u think
about Raid configuration, and also if u just think in performance terms.

What about RAID? Performance how?

Ben

 

[Ben Pope]

I don't care a **** about benchmark: my feeling of everyday use is enough.

The benchmarks, applied correctly, will tell you WHERE the performance gains
are.

Everyday use doing what? Transferring large files? Deleting a directory on
an NTFS partition with 3000 files? What?

I do administer 100 systems, and u can bet there is a big deal of
difference between SATA and ATA. SATA give me a feeling not so different
from SCSI, finally.

What drives? What drives?

So, if u want to say upgrade not worth the price if u do have reasonably
new ATA drives configured in Raid0 mode, I can say ok. But if u say ATA
and SATA are pretty much the same in term of performance in every day use,
well, I say: check your system configuration becouse u are wrong.

And I say provide an argument rather than uninformed opinions.

Ben

 

[Gareth Jones]

While I agree in general with Ben's post, one thing to note is that
while its not an inherent feature of SATA alone, most SATA controllers
these days do provide a RAID0 ability as standard, hence the reason most
of my machines now have an effective sustained data transfer of around
110MB/s.
Indeed.

You can get this with PATA, but not as easily or cheaply.

I disagree, the drives and controllers probably similar prices, with PATA
being a smidgen cheaper.

As long as the PATA controller had 2 channels and you had one drive on each,
you have the same thing. You would of course likely be limited to 133MB/s
unless it was chipset native.[/QUOTE]

You've missed my point. Most motherboards with PATA don't have RAID
Most with SATA do.
Therefore you have to buy an additional controller, therefore it is not
as easy or as cheap.

Note - I do know you get motherboards with PATA RAID. I've used them.

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[Jay T. Blocksom]

SATA is much faster than standard IDE/133.

[snip]

No, it isn't.

In any disk storage subsystem, the maximum performance attainable is a
function of the *slowest* link in the chain (i.e., the raw disk drive itself,
the disk controller, and the host system interface). Given the drives in
question, the host system interface is *NOT* that slowest link in either case;
so it is largely moot from an actual performance POV. Do not confuse
performance *potential* with "performance".

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[Ben Pope]

While I agree in general with Ben's post, one thing to note is that
while its not an inherent feature of SATA alone, most SATA controllers
these days do provide a RAID0 ability as standard, hence the reason most
of my machines now have an effective sustained data transfer of around
110MB/s.
Indeed.

You can get this with PATA, but not as easily or cheaply.

I disagree, the drives and controllers probably similar prices, with PATA
being a smidgen cheaper.

As long as the PATA controller had 2 channels and you had one drive on
each, you have the same thing. You would of course likely be limited to
133MB/s unless it was chipset native.

You've missed my point. Most motherboards with PATA don't have RAID
Most with SATA do.
Therefore you have to buy an additional controller, therefore it is not
as easy or as cheap.

Note - I do know you get motherboards with PATA RAID. I've used them.[/QUOTE]

OK, I see.

But boards with SATA on are more expensive than the boards without. OK, so
with "deluxe" boards you effectively get all the other stuff pretty cheap,
certainly cheaper than add on cards. But if somebody purchased a deluxe
board specifically to get SATA then it's no cheaper than a PCI SATA card -
about the same price.

I see your point though. Just disagreeing out of habit now... but we have
strayed somewhat from "SATA is faster than PATA"

Ben

 

[Vormulac]

Gentlemen, please!

You have all offered a wealth of information, which from a variety of
angles has suggested that I look to S-ATA if I which to advance my system;
that works for me, thank you.
Whether it be for reasons of compatibility or performance, it sounds like
S-ATA is well worth the money as part of my forthcoming upgrade, the only
question now being whether I can afford to get 2 and set up RAID0 or not
(hopefully obtaining a more favourable result than on my horrid old Abit
KR7A-RAID *shudder*).

Thanks to everyone who has contributed, I didn't mean to open quite such a
can of worms!

I think we can all agree that S-ATA is *good*, then shake hands and go our
separate ways.

Thanks again.

Uncle Vormy.

 

[_P_e_ar_lALegend]

Il Tue, 29 Jun 2004 21:35:00 +0100, Ben Pope ha scritto:

I have no great desire to try RAID 0.

Ohhh! Why that? It's a big improvement in performance.

Which drives are you comparing?

Oh well, nothing sooo esotic: just simple Maxtor with 8MB of cache. There
is a LOT of difference between ATA and SATA models, especially if u run
them in Raid 0 mode.

What about RAID? Performance how?

Raid 0 is in real life perfomance two times faster than a single drive.
It's like loading data from a ram disk, on my system. ATA Raid 0 is half
less faster than SATA Raid 0.

In my opinion, in this days, there is no point to buy ATA.

 

[_P_e_ar_lALegend]

SATA is much faster than standard IDE/133.

[snip]

No, it isn't.

In any disk storage subsystem, the maximum performance attainable is a
function of the *slowest* link in the chain (i.e., the raw disk drive itself,
the disk controller, and the host system interface). Given the drives in
question, the host system interface is *NOT* that slowest link in either case;
so it is largely moot from an actual performance POV. Do not confuse
performance *potential* with "performance".

Your is theory. Try it for real.

 

[Leythos]

Whether it be for reasons of compatibility or performance, it sounds like
S-ATA is well worth the money as part of my forthcoming upgrade, the only
question now being whether I can afford to get 2 and set up RAID0 or not
(hopefully obtaining a more favourable result than on my horrid old Abit
KR7A-RAID *shudder*).

I think that you should reconsider using RAID-0, unless you are fully
aware of the implications. RAID-), while fast, will do very little in
normal home user settings, and most people, in a home user setting will
not really benefit from it.

On the bad side, RAID-0 has a much higher failure rate - due to hardware
faults - than a single drive or a RAID-1 (mirror) configuration. No
matter what anyone tells you, two drives are more likely to have a
problem than a single drive, or redundant drives.

My ASUS PC-DL does SATA, has two RAID controllers, and I can even hot
swap the Promise drives in the even of a fault. I've designing boards
and systems for more than 20 years and would never install RAID-0 on a
users system, unless they were doing video editing and the drive
subsystem could not keep up with the editing applications.

 

[Ben Pope]

Il Tue, 29 Jun 2004 21:35:00 +0100, Ben Pope ha scritto:

Oh well, nothing sooo esotic: just simple Maxtor with 8MB of cache. There

Model numbers, please. There are loads of 8MB maxtor drives.

is a LOT of difference between ATA and SATA models, especially if u run
them in Raid 0 mode.

??

Why would SATA RAID give more gains than ATA RAID?

Raid 0 is in real life perfomance two times faster than a single drive.

Depends what you're doing.

It's like loading data from a ram disk, on my system. ATA Raid 0 is half
less faster than SATA Raid 0.

Really? Wow. You must have slow RAM.

Ben

 

[Travis King]

Don't expect IDE to phase out yet... CD drive makers have no intentions on
having SATA CD drives yet.