• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Darned SATA Drives

A

alexkerhead

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 13, 2006
Messages
839
Location
Montgomery, AL USA
I finally got a sata drive for my P4 rig, and darned are they a pain in the azz. I had to make a three floppy set to use it, and then a utility disk, then a darned sil 3112(controller) driver disk, just to load windows.
Ahhh, I think we need to go back to mfm technology.:sarcasm:
Seriously though, sata is a pain, but now I got it going, this thing feels 3x faster.
Sorry, but I needed to rant..lol
 
We've been going over sata drives in my hardware class, and most of the people are singing the praises of it. I'm happy with my ide, and see no reason to upgrade as far as my personal machine. I'm glad you like it, though, now that it's all running.
 
Nathan, I must say, for general use(what I use them for) it isn't worth it, but I got a good deal on a hitachi 80GB sata, for $35 new...couldn't pass it up.
I will keep using ide in everything else until something newer is required..lol
Enterprise, the raid doesn't actually increase performance enough to notice, only a sensitive gaming benchmark would show the difference, it is still only 150mb/s. You just have two mirroring drives, one goes bad in raid, you are screwed. Keep away from raid...lol
Performance difference is:
Old Seagate 7200.8 was 800pts in pcmark2002
New Hitachi 7200.8 is 1200pts in pcmark2002
Quite a difference..lol
 
I don't get it...
How can a serial transfer be faster than parallel at the same clock speed? The SATA transfers a single bit of data with each clock pulse, while the ATA transfers 16 bits at a time. Is it just because the SATA drives are newer and likely to be faster, so that the transfers appear faster in spite of the bottleneck? Or mebbe it's a case of the SATA hardware bypassing the system bus (PCI) somehow and avoiding the bottleneck there involving the speed limitations of PCI? Or is it sum'n else I'm overlooking?

--T
 
Strange. For SATA all I ever did was plug it in. I never had to do anything other than plug it in just like any other drive. As for how can it go faster, PATA and SATA go at different speeds. (I had to state the obvious, I had to get it out of my system.) SATA II Operates in the same fasion as SCSI does. It all has to do with HOW it moves the data. Not necessarly how fast it moves it, but in what order. PATA just moves it in some oddball order, SATA II and SCSI both move the bits of data in consecutive order. So in a nut shell, they made SATA II just like SCSI, only with out all of the voltage types.

General Info be here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA


-V


Oh Yeah, give me SCSI anyday......
 
You mean all you ever "do"? SATA is the newest end user hdd connection.
Maybe it is because my computer is newer than windows XP, and I used the onboard controller.
This setup has the same sustained mb/s that scsi has.
 
I do a lot of R&D work and we use pretty high end machines to do stuff on. A majority of them have had SATA. (Except the server darn it.) All I ment by that was I plugged in the power and data cables and it took off. On the other hand, the SATA controllers were all built in. And SATA and SCSI being the speed is good, but I miss configuring SCSI. It was always an adventure.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top