Which Hard Drive?

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Hello chaps,

am looking to upgrade on the old Hard Drive front and have noticed that since my last effort a new format has appeared in SATA - a serial option. With the obvious differences in Data transfer rates are there any benefits/pitfalls in this option as against the old trusty UDMA 133 one (after all this is already quicker than my UDMA100 old feller....) I notice that you have to install a controller card but would there be any other considerations?

Thanx in advance and have a Merry Chrimble guys.

[newswatcher]

SATA offers better performance, but it is usually more expensive so, for the casual user, SATA isn't really necessary. While there isn't a huge performance difference between SATA and ATA/133, there is some, and if you require top-of-the-line performance, SATA would be the way to go.
This (http://www.pcreview.co.uk/article.php?threadid=4021) article appeared in PCReview, and contains some interesting comparative info.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Wing Commander Fowler,

Think of a hard drive as a water pump. Most hard drives pump water at 36 gallons an hour.

If you have an ATA-33 hose, so the pump can only pump 33 gallons an hour.

Then you put in an ATA-66 hose, the pump now can only pump 36 gallons an hour.

Then you put in an ATA-100 hose, the pump still can only pump 36 gallons an hour.

Then you put in an ATA-133 hose, the pump still can only pump 36 gallons an hour.

Then you put in an SATA-150 hose, the pump still can only pump 36 gallons an hour. (The PCI Bus can only run at a max theoretical limit of 133, so you will not get SATA-150 out of a PCI Card SATA Contoller.)

If were to buy the Western Digital Raptor 10,000rpm SATA Hard Drive, then it is worth going SATA. It is much faster than any 7200rpm drive.

If you currently have a 5400rpm drive in your computer, then getting Western Digital ATA-100 7200rpm drive with an 8Mb Cache, is also a good upgrade and cheaper than a Raptor Drive.

Take Care,

Richard

[amanoffewwords]

I'd buy an IBM(*) drive myself - always have and always will - rock solid quality (touch wood).

Cheers
amowf

(*) but it would still only pump 36 gallons... ;)

[goates]

As Naples said, a SATA drive won't offer much of a performance benefit unless you get one of the 10,000 RPM Raptor drives. There are some new motherboards starting to come out though that have SATA built in and connected directly to the main controller chips on the motherboard. This allows the SATA connection to bypass the PCI bus and theoretically achieve 150MB/s. However, until these new motherboards become common, you won't notice any performance increase using SATA drives.

I have a Seagate SATA drive and it has been working fine for me. It only cost about $30(CDN) more than the IDE version. the cables are much easier to work though.

goates

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Hehe..... thanx boys. Richard you had me woried there - saw you lurking just after I posted this and thought "any minute"...... then ya let me down, but not for long!! As an ex Clanky I can relate to all the water pump theory and so I guess I shoulda told you what size hose and length and diameter etc so you could work out the frictional losses....... Happens it's only a low spec AMD setup with little in the way of fancy doodles so I suspect it ain't worth me going SATA in the long run.

Have my eye on a 7200RPM with 8 Meg cache as an option so will go for that after all.

Many thanx again guys and y'all have a very Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.

:ok:

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Wing Commander Fowler,

It took me a little time to type all that out with my two fingers, (I know, such a shame, I never learned to type!), but I was able to get a post up for you in the end.

If you are looking to boost your disk access, another solution for you is putting two IDE Drives on a PCI RAID controller. If you use RAID 0 (w/16k Stripe) you will seriously boost your disk access performance. (ATA-100 PCI RAID Cards are cheap, and with a pair of Western Digital WD400JB or WD800JB Drives you will not break the bank.)

I am running a pair of Raptor Drives on my onboard SATA RAID Controller with a 16k Stripe. You can see how fast a pair of drives are: (I used HDTach 2.61 (http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach) for the benchmark. They have 2.7 available for download if you want to benchmark your hard drives.)

http://www.naples-air-center.com/DAoC/wd_raptor.jpg

It is more than double the throughput of any 7200rpm Drive w/8Mb Cache.

Take Care,

Richard

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Hmm Richard - that sounds of interest. Not knowing anything about RAID, can I use my existing UDMA 100 drives with a controller OR would I have to get RAID compatible hardware as it were? What limitations are there such as pairing UDMA133 and UDMA100?

Thanx again

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Wing Commander Fowler,

You would use a RAID Controller Card. Anand Tech had an excellent article on RAID Controllers a couple of years ago. The info explaining the Theory is well worth the read:

IDE RAID Comparison (http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491)

With the current reliability of Hard Drives, it is now worth going with RAID 0 (Stripping). Just make sure you keep up your backup routine.

With two drives, you want them to be matched for optimal performance. If you have a 60Gb ATA-100 7200rpm w/8Mb Cache and an 80Gb ATA-133 7200rpm w/8Mb Cache you will not have a speed issue, remember the 36 gallons per hour per drive, but you will be limited to the use of 60Gb per drive and your system would see it as one 120Gb Drive. Anand Tech goes into greater detail in the article. If you put a 5400rpm drive with a 7200Rpm drive, you will only get about double the thoughput of the 5400rpm drive, not the 7200rpm drive.

Take Care,

Richard