SATA II

[scall]

I'm looking to boost performance in my PC. I have one available PCIe x1 slot and was thinking of buying a hardware controller that would allow me to have a SATA II drive running over the PCIe x1 channel. Can anyone recommend a SATA II drive that would have a transfer rate close to the maximum of 300 Gb/sec? Some manufacturers say that their drives are 300 Gb/sec capable, but actual speeds vary significantly. Any help is appreciated.

 

[Ricemarine]

Ummmm............. no hard drive can operate at 300 gb/sec. Otherwise data would be transferred instantly rather than 25 minutes...

 

[scall]

SCSI can transfer at burst speeds of 320 MB/sec. I'm wondering if SATA II can come close to SCSI in performance.

 

[scall]

What data are you transferring that takes 25 minutes? Sounds like you might want to upgrade as well.

 

[Ricemarine]

Originally posted by: scall
What data are you transferring that takes 25 minutes? Sounds like you might want to upgrade as well.

It was an example...

SATA has a burst speed of I believe 150 mb/sec. ATA has a burst of I believe 100 to 133 mb/s...

So... GB's are way out of range.

 

[scall]

The speed I listed was Gb (gigabit, or 300 MB/sec).

 

[Ricemarine]

Originally posted by: scall
The speed I listed was Gb (gigabit, or 300 MB/sec).

300 gigabits = 38 400 megabytes
3 gigabits = 384 megabytes.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: scall
SCSI can transfer at burst speeds of 320 MB/sec. I'm wondering if SATA II can come close to SCSI in performance.

burst and transfer are 2 different things and burst is for an extremely small amount of time so you don't count burst as it really means nothing. plus many scsi raid controllers have built in ram which even further skews the real numbers. i have the fastest u320 15k hdd around - the seagate 15k.5 and it maxes out ~130MB/s in theory but since i have it connected into a regular 32bit, 33MHz pci slot i get ~100MB/s and this the the ultimate in any hdd - look at the price for the 15k.5.

there is no single drive that is faster, period. what you get with scsi is an extremely mature ncq and the faster rotational speeds. the raptor is going to be you closest drive in comparison to scsi for a sata setup. and don't put too much into the sataII vs sata comparison as most of it is marketing and not always part of the drive. some people put certain options of the 2nd sata version into drives where others don't.

 

[scall]

Ok, that helps. So if you were given the option of buying either a hardware controller (PCIe 1x to SATA) vs. SCSI, which would you prefer?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: scall
Ok, that helps. So if you were given the option of buying either a hardware controller (PCIe 1x to SATA) vs. SCSI, which would you prefer?

how much hdd space do you need?

 

[scall]

Not much, 160-250 GB is fine.

 

[Ricemarine]

Originally posted by: scall
Not much, 160-250 GB is fine.

I'd just get a cheap SATA controller...

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: scall
Not much, 160-250 GB is fine.

do you have onboard sata I? the reason i am asking is because if your performance issues are in fact disk i/o, then a raptor would be the easy, most cost effective answer. the reason i have scsi is because i bought them when there were no 10K ide hdds, and i also go tremendous deals on them - my 15k.5 i think i paid $100 or so for where it retails for much more. if i were to do it all over i would go a raptor because i think it gives very good results and the price, although a bit steep is scsi performance, and even better than some 15k hdds in desktop usage data patterns. in all honesty, i am looking for a fujitsu mas, map or max 15k to be my main hdd as their firmware is better suited towards desktop work compared to my 15k.5.

if you want to make the $$$ investment, you can pick up older u320 15k scsi hdds for a reasonable price, and your best bet would be to run a u160 card (a u320 drive will work on a u160 card) because most manf are not really doing much in the way of pci-e and scsi, they are going straight to sas, so u320 scsi kind of gets left out in the cold. there is one pci-e raid card that is i think a dell perc4 or something like that - pci-e (i think 4 or 8x) but runs ~$150 if you find a deal. sas cards are also very expensive but with them you can run true enterprise sas drives and also sata drives, but again, $$ is the biggest issue.

for desktop use and if i were doing it now without my desire for scsi since i have used it for 10+yrs, and i found the excellent deals i have, i would go a 150GB raptor w/ a 500-1TB storage hdd if you need that much room. if all you need is 150-250 GB, pick up a raptor, either 74 or 150MB 16MB cache one and a 250GB hdd as having 2hdds does increase performance a bit having the pagefile off the main hdd.

the thing about scsi is that most of the cards are larger, 64bit 66/133MHz slots that are on workstation boards. i currently have a lsi raid u320 card sitting on my desk, and a spare 10K fujitstu hdd, not sure if i am going to use it as i would need to pick up 2 more 36GB hdds for a raid 5 arrangement, but i don't think i need it for my home server and also since i am trying to cut back on power usage and heat output. when i bought i figured i would pick up quite a few drives, but it just doesn't seem the way to go atm for me since my computer room is hot enough, and scsi drives usually run a bit warmer - i run active cooling on all of my hdd, but the scsi drives do put off more heat.

also, are you sure it is the disk i/o that is giving you the performance issue? sure you are simply just running out of ram?

hope this helps

 

[Zepper]

There is no drive that I know of that will really stress the capacity of SATA 150. The fastest drive I know of is the Seagate 15k5 (SCSI) which hits about 125 MB/s on the outer tracks. So your SATA 1 (150) ports will get nearly the same performance as a SATA 2 (300) controller out of any normal drive (currently top out at around 80MB/sec on the outer tracks). Just be aware that many if not all SATA 2 drives come defaulted to SATA 2, so don't forget to jumper the drive to SATA 1 to make sure it will work with your SATA 1 controller. Some, if not all, SATA 2 drives will play dead if they aren't jumpered and come up against an incompatible controller (one that can't autonegotiate) - there is a list on the web page for the Hitachi 7K160 of controllers known to autonegotiate (the Silicon Image 3512 chip works too from personal experience). I know as I RMAd what was probably a perfectly good drive for just that reason. The gist is that I'd recommend a Seagate 250GB 7200.10 drive if you're in the market for that size - just be sure to jumper it for your existing controller (you may have to provide the jumper as the default is SATA 300 (no jumper)). Toms Hardware recently ran a test of ALL 7200.10 Seagate models. Some of their findings are very interesting (it's included in an article about SATA drives in general).

.bh.