Hard Drive Arguement, Need help here.

[Mattd46612]

Basically my side is that sata1 vs sata2 vs scsi u160 vs u320 doesnt matter because the drives themselves are not fast enough to come anywhere close to using 3gb/s or 1.5gb/s of bandwidth. If a drive can only read 60mb/s then how would sata1 or sata2 really make a difference? Maybe Im wrong but Id take the drive with the faster random access and faster avg read speed than one with a higher theoretical bandwidth.

 

[LouPoir]

I agree

 

[StopSign]

Yeah that sounds about right. And don't forget about spindle speed.

 

[Hardlin]

You are correct. Drive performance is a combination of rotational speed, areal density, access speed and cache (this will produce max sustained raid, burst rates, etc). No drive can sustain anywhere near what the interfaces show as their theoretical maximum.

 

[Blain]

Is pure transfer speed the ONLY difference between SATA1 & SATA2 standards?

 

[bwnv]

Shouldn't have included SCSI in the op, it's a completely different animal. Think of it this way; SATA- 1 drive per bus, PATA- 2 drives per bus, SCSI- up to 14 drives per bus. SCSI can and does saturate bus bandwidth easily. As far as SATA 1 vs 2, agreed.

 

[Mattd46612]

Well Im figuring it on a home computer where I have 2 scsi u160 on a PCI slot. so yes Im limited in that respect. The general arguement was towards drives and interfaces in general. and that sata dont have special parts to make them faster from their ide counterparts. Faster cable not faster drive itself in general....

 

[Jiggz]

Agree! Whoever disagrees will get HDD 101 in the head!

 

[Zepper]

Seagate's new Cheetah 15.5 SCSI with perpendicular recording can do something like 125MB/sec continuous on the outer tracks and 100MB/sec average. Burst rate is astronomical. More than one of those on the adapter and you do need U320 and a fancy bus like 64bit/66MHz Enhanced PCI or PCI Express. But in general I also agree with the OP as your average user isn't going to be buying those.

.bh.