IDE or SATA?

[Indybird]

Im just curious, without accounting for RPMs and RAID, is SATA really so much faster than IDE that you can notice a dramatic difference?

[Cool1Net6]

PATA (IDE) ends at 133 MB/second.
SATA I has a speed of 150 MB/second.
SATA II has a speed of 300 MB/second.

"You will only experience a performance increase in circumstances where you are accessing data on the drive. Games will not benefit other than with quicker load times. Applications such as rendering will only benefit if the data files being worked on (and the resultant calculations) are too large to be held in system memory."

-Cool-

[Indybird]

First of all, I like the sound of quicker load times...

Second, I've seen hard drives called "SATA 3.0Gb/s", do those go at 3 Gb/second?

[Silenced_Coyote]

No they do not. I just means that data transfer speed has a higher limit. In reality, speeds won't go near that high. As long as you have SATA, that will be good enough.

Oh, the load times aren't that much quicker. You might get .5 seconds faster in some games. It isn't a huge difference, not like you are getting a minute faster than everyone else.

[Omega]

gah gah gah gah.

Datarate's don't mean crap if the hard drive itself can't read at the proper speed. I have SATA II and my drive can theoretically send data at 150gbps, however the drive read speed is only somewhere in the neighborhood of 300-600mbps, so speed depends mainly on the RPM.

btw, Cool, it's GB/s, not MB/s.

[Kaky]

Definetly sata but what is it with the 15k rpm does it exist ???

[Silenced_Coyote]

I know that Seagate makes a 15k RPM drive called the Cheetah but it isn't SATA, it is SCSI.

[Airbozo]

I know that Seagate makes a 15k RPM drive called the Cheetah but it isn't SATA, it is SCSI.


I have a pair of those in my workstation here at work and they are a little noisy but data transfer is noticibley faster than sata.

[nil8]

No you won't notice a huge difference. You will get shorter time copying large chunks of data or if you're processing very large files. Other than that, not really.

SATA is way, way better for airflow though.

[MitaPi]

Here is a 15,000 RPM Internal Hard Drive....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822116154



I would much rather have 2 of these 10,000 RPM Raptors with a WINDOW.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136011

[Silenced_Coyote]

I'd rather save my money because I know I won't be looking through the hard drive window and I am more than patient enough to wait a few seconds.

[Airbozo]

I'd rather save my money because I know I won't be looking through the hard drive window and I am more than patient enough to wait a few seconds.


I tried very hard to justify the purchase of those drives with windows, but in the end, who would ever know unless you designed your case so the drive windows would be visible (which I could have done in my current project)...

at home I have a couple of WD 250's in raid and only notice a speed difference when doing compiles for a friend or loading digital media. I actually went through the time to test them in raid and non raid and the raid setup is only about 1/2 a second faster loading a media file.

you want some real speed, take some of the large sata drives and limit the data to specific cylinders (about a 1/4 of the drive), then raid them across different controllers.

[MitaPi]

I was just pointing out that you can get 2 nice looking hard drives for the price of one 15k rpm hard drive. But I have to admit... unless you could show them off they would be pretty useless as far as looks go.

So what do people perfer here? Seagate or Western Digital. I've heard that those two are the leading brands in Hard Drives.


Airbozo... what do you mean in that last part about raid and stuff? I dont know much about raid and hard drives so thats why I ask. You have my attention though ^_^

[Indybird]

Yeah, I definitely like SATA because the cables are so small and neat.

I most definitely like Western Digital I've bought like 5 HDD's and one external HDD from them and they've all worked great. The latest one I got (Check my sig) is real quiet...

[MitaPi]

HA! lol I was going to buy one of those a while back. But then my friend who works at best buy offered to exchange my 200GB maxtor in an external vantech Nex-star 3 case for a 320GB Seagate internal.

[Airbozo]

Airbozo... what do you mean in that last part about raid and stuff? I dont know much about raid and hard drives so thats why I ask. You have my attention though ^_^


Well, one of the techniques we used at sgi to achieve optimal drive performance on the OS build machines, was to limit the head travel of the drive to a limited number of cylinders on each drive. This is done by creating a partition on the drive that is very small. Some disk tools will allow you to limit the drive to particular cylinders for the partition (sgi's fx tool will allow you to do this, but I am pretty sure fdisk will not). What this does is keep the heads from traveling very far from the data you need, so that disk access times go down (think of the heads moving from the edge to the inside track of a platter. The less they move the faster the access time). We would then total up the theoretical throughput of the drive (how much data can it push) and then only install X amount of drives on each controller so the drives will never saturate the controller with data. We would then add each of those drives to a raid array (striped because we were not concerned with drive failures) in a round robin fashion. We also played with the stripe size to acheive maximum data throughput. This effectivley reduced data access time by as much as 60% depending on the setup. At that time we were more concerned with how long it took to do OS compiles than we were with the cost of storage.

Whew! (this is only a breif overview since getting into details would flood this thread. It took us several months of tweaking to get maximum performance and we ruined a few drives in the process).

[nil8]

That sounds like neat stuff. Mind posting the long version for us nerds in another post?

[Airbozo]

That sounds like neat stuff. Mind posting the long version for us nerds in another post?

I could post it, but it deals with the setup on an sgi system with sgi tools. I have the drives and controller to set it up under windows or redhat, but have not had the need or time yet.

[a.Bird]

I really just want to say that this forum kicks some serious butt. All of you knowledgable members are so helpful whenever an opporunity arrives to serve the less informed. That is truly a wonderful thing because, well as the saying goes, knowledge is power. I'd just like to ask a few questions regarding this SATA business because I'm really out of the loop.

1. Is SATA eventually going to replace IDE?
2. With better airflow, faster read times, and SATA headers on most new mobos... where does SATA fail the benchmark when compared to IDE?
3. Can you run SATA and IDE drives simulatenously?

[simon275]

1. Probably

2.
PATA (IDE) ends at 133 MB/second.
SATA I has a speed of 150 MB/second.
SATA II has a speed of 300 MB/second.

SATA wins tiz faster does not fail the benchmark anyware.

3. Yes one drive has to be set as master the others as slave doesn't matter on which interface.

[a.Bird]

Awesome. Thanks for the info!

[simon275]

Any time. :)