No improvement in switch from PATA to SATA?

[NokiaDude]

I just bought a brand new 250GB SATA Hitachi hard drive because I thought my Western Digital WD2000JB was slowing me down. I have an A64+ 3200+ on an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe. According to the built in HD benchmark in the device manger, the sustained rate is 60MB/s. My WD benched at only 55MB/s. I'm 99.9% I have all the latest drivers installed and everything should be set for maximum performance. Is this how SATA drives really perform? I know they do nothing near 150MB/s but I wanted to see at least a 20MB/s improvement!

 

[NokiaDude]

The drive is an SATA Hitachi 7K250.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Why did you expect such an increase?

Did you read any articles under the Storage tab before deciding this upgrade made sense? Did you ask us here before making the purchase?

Oh well, this is how you learn.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

SATA drives are just PATA drives with a different interface. You're basically going to see no improvement going from PATA to SATA unless the drive has different specs (like bigger cache, raptor, etc.)

You're paying for the thinner cable right now, as harddrives don't even get speed limited by the PATA cable.

 

[NokiaDude]

Jeez, I thought SATA would give me a good increase over PATA. I've been reading ALOT of reviews where people with RAID 0 drives were reading 200MB/s. I thought with a single SATA I'd get at least 100MB/s. My rig seems a little glitchy, it's stable but it "hiccups" often when I'm doing alot of stuff. I have !GB of RAM and this didn't happen to me with my Barton 2500+ with the same amount of RAM.

 

[boyRacer]

I got the same increase from getting an PATA to SATA adapter.

Those 7K250s are nice drives though.

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Don't buy the Raid 0 hype. It has been shown by various sites for awhile that Raid 0 doesn't give any real benefit (other than some huge file transfers in Photoshop etc.) over non Raid. Sisandra graphs look nice but real world benchmarking has shown that Raid 0 in the single user market is a marketing gimmick mostly

 

[magomago]

You live and you learn.

Makes me wonder about people who jumped on intels 9XX chipset thinking of all the increased preformance they'd get with PCI-E and DDR2

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: NokiaDude
Jeez, I thought SATA would give me a good increase over PATA. I've been reading ALOT of reviews where people with RAID 0 drives were reading 200MB/s. I thought with a single SATA I'd get at least 100MB/s. My rig seems a little glitchy, it's stable but it "hiccups" often when I'm doing alot of stuff. I have !GB of RAM and this didn't happen to me with my Barton 2500+ with the same amount of RAM.

Those reviews were full of $hit.
There isn't a single harddrive on the market right now that will sustain 100 MB/Sec, though some of the higher end SCSI drives come close.

 

[BigLan]

The main benefit of sata is in NCQ (see the anand dual core articles.) Some of the new-generation drives are native sata (no parallel bridge) but performance hasn't increased that much in the last few years.

 

[UNCjigga]

Real benefit of SATA is for multitasking, not benchmarking. You don't see much of a benefit now, but once you add Longhorn, dual-core, NCQ, SATA2-300 and RAID all up it'll smoke an equivalent setup on PATA in general usage. I'm not sure, but I thought there is lower CPU utilization as well--benchmarks won't show this but real-world usage will show this benefit.

 

[NokiaDude]

Then what's making my computer "feel" sluggish? I have all the latest drivers and all drives are at least in UDMA 5 mode.

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
1GB Corsair TWINX1024-3200XL 2-2-2-5 RAM
Hitachi 7K250 SATA HD
Asus 256mb Geforce 6800 PCI-E

Under heavy multi-tasking I still have plenty of RAM left but I'm getting lots of "hiccups". It's ANNOYING the crap outta me. This setup should handle whatever I throw at it with ease.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: NokiaDude
The drive is an SATA Hitachi 7K250.

The PATA version of that same drive is 2 mb/s faster.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: UNCjigga
Real benefit of SATA is for multitasking, not benchmarking. You don't see much of a benefit now, but once you add Longhorn, dual-core, NCQ, SATA2-300 and RAID all up it'll smoke an equivalent setup on PATA in general usage. I'm not sure, but I thought there is lower CPU utilization as well--benchmarks won't show this but real-world usage will show this benefit.

Damn, People are acting like SATA is a cure all for every problem on their PC. Ohhh! 150MB/s It's not going to be any faster than it's PATA equilivalant in the bench marks, ever since UDMA 4 or 5 PATA drive have included TCQ as part of their protocol. The problems was is that none of the controller manufacturers chose to implemet it into their designs, except for Pacific Digital With their ATA 100 Automatic DMA Discstaq controler. SATA and PATA are the same when it comes to CPU usage, so if you want to lower CPU Utilization , the only way to lower it is to use a dedicated controller card like an LSI i4
http://www.lsilogic.com/files/docs/tech...age_stand_prod/RAIDpage/mr_i4_qhsg.pdf

http://www.atacom.com/program/print_htm...0_70_118_0_2&Item_code=CONO_LSIX_10_I4

Or just Get SCSI, which is ultra low on CPU usage.

General Usage when it comes to NCQ/TCQ show a small .1% deficit in general usage performance. NCQ is best when used in server enviroments where the drive will recieve 24or more simultanious requests. General usage does not typcaly exceed 1 request, two in a heavy general work or play enviroment.