yes, i could google it...but if i post this, i can ask the exact question i want and get the answer from people who (for the most part) seem to know what they're talking about...and yes, i searched, but found nothing i was looking for

okay, so the question: what difference does it make whether or not i get a 3gb/s sata hard drive or an ata100 pata hard drive (both at 7200rpm)? i have heard that drive write speeds are roughly 70mb/s, so how is it advantageous to me to pay extra for that sata drive? i understand that seagate's perpendicular recording offers some advantages, but if i can save $75 on a 500gb hard drive with the same specs save for ata100 and sata 3gb/s interfaces, why should i go with the sata drive?

9/16/2006 6:17:38 PM

I think you just answered your own question.

But seriously, I have no idea.

9/17/2006 4:03:49 AM

^^ 70mb/s? Maybe in a raid array or in a single burst write, but no where near that in normal operation.

9/17/2006 9:57:53 AM

so what's the advantage of a 3gb/s sata drive?

9/17/2006 10:09:13 AM

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/page36.html

Quote :

"If you're building a new PC or refurbishing an older one, we recommend choosing some variant of Serial ATA for your hard drive interface. These work a little faster thanks to command queuing, are easier to cable up, and cost only a little more than equivalent UltraATA models (sometimes they cost no more at all.) Those whose machines support only UltraATA need not spring for an add-in SATA controller: the slight difference in performance isn't worth the extra cost."

Quote :

"It's also still true that Serial ATA works faster than UltraATA only in a very few cases. Though both 150 and 300 MBytes/s SATA versions may be theoretically faster than UltraATA/133 and UltraATA/100, in practice most hard disks top out at speeds somewhat slower than 80 MBytes/s anyway, regardless of interface type; most run at about 70 MBytes/s. In actual use, there's little more that these devices can deliver, because the underlying file system (this means NTFS for most Windows installations) takes its toll and sequential disk access to a substantial number of sectors happens only rarely."

3gb/s doesn't matter as a spec as i remember...thats just the bandwidth of the interfece. the hard drive can't spit anywhere near that much data. its just marketing bs. rpm matters the most


http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-37,GGLJ:en&q=uata+vs+sata
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-37,GGLJ:en&q=pata+vs+sata

9/17/2006 11:09:31 AM

^ thanks for the quotes and links

i appreciate the input

9/17/2006 2:24:45 PM

Note that the 3.0Gb/sec figure quoted as the theoretical maximum is in bits per second, where that 70MB/sec is in bytes per second.

SATA-II is good because you can put 4-5 drives on a single channel with a port multiplier without a whole lot of overhead. PATA has similar bandwidth for a single drive, but the interface does not support split transactions so when you attempt to use two disks on a single PATA channel simuntaneously the scaling is horrible. SATA-II supports command queueing and split transactions, meaning that the bus can support multiple outstanding transactions and each device on the bus can also have multiple outstanding transactions and reorder them to service them most efficiently. This is not a feature that the typical home user will probably ever need, but the convergence of enterprise and home storage markets is going to be a good thing for enterprise customers

Noen- recent 7200RPM ATA drives do have peak linear transfer rates of 60 to 70MB, several cleanly over 70MB/sec. The SCSI 300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 has a peak of around 135MB/sec. These values aren't from cache, these are from the platters and are the peak zone values observed during a full stroke read of the entire disk. I'm not really sure what you mean by 'normal operation' but single user desktop access patterns tend to be pretty damn linear and in some cases (e.g. loading level and texture data for a game, encoding music or audio data) are as linear as you can get within the context of a filesystem.

9/17/2006 2:48:40 PM

Here's some benchmarks from my PC:

Standard 80GB SATAI 7200rpm:
Avg. Read - 56MB/s
Burst - 133MB/s

WD Raptor 74GB SATAI 10,000rpm:
Avg. Read - 64MB/s
Burst - 121MB/s

Samsung (2) 160GB SATAII 7200rpm (RAID-0):
Avg. Read - 102MB/s
Burst - 246MB/s

Sooo... unless you're running RAID, chances are you won't hit the over ATA/133 or SATAI speeds... not sure abou the new larger platter/PR drives.

[Edited on September 17, 2006 at 3:42 PM. Reason : .]

9/17/2006 3:40:42 PM

^ what benchmarking program did you use?

9/17/2006 7:12:06 PM

HDTach is a good one, here's the results I got from my computer at work

9/17/2006 8:32:12 PM

benchmarks from this enclosure coming soon

http://www.thewolfweb.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=427353

[Edited on September 17, 2006 at 9:54 PM. Reason : should hit around 500MB/sec at 8 drives before I run into the PCI64/66 bottleneck, eheheh]

9/17/2006 9:53:22 PM