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#1
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Does nForce2 chipset provide performance advantage for SATA drives?
A colleague of mine has advised that the current state-of-the-art
chipsets supporting AMD XP processors will not provide any performance advantage over a UDMA 133 IDE hard drive. Hence, buying a SATA hard drive for my A7N8X would be a waste of money. Is that correct? Thanks for the help. |
#2
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"Ed T Wilson" wrote in message ... A colleague of mine has advised that the current state-of-the-art chipsets supporting AMD XP processors will not provide any performance advantage over a UDMA 133 IDE hard drive. Hence, buying a SATA hard drive for my A7N8X would be a waste of money. Is that correct? Thanks for the help. In general, the SATA interface provides few benefits over the PATA-100/133 interface. The one exception is the 10,000 RPM Western Digital 8MB SATA 36.7GB "Raptor" harddrive. If you're in the market for a new hard drive, it may be worth a look. |
#3
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In article , Ed T Wilson
wrote: A colleague of mine has advised that the current state-of-the-art chipsets supporting AMD XP processors will not provide any performance advantage over a UDMA 133 IDE hard drive. Hence, buying a SATA hard drive for my A7N8X would be a waste of money. Is that correct? Thanks for the help. The current state of affairs has less to do with the AMD versus Intel thing, than it has to do with bus architecture. A PC has a series of busses chained together, each one tuned to the needs of the peripherals that are connected to it. The fastest bus is the one between the Processor and the Northbridge, and is capable of tremendous bandwidth. Depending on the generation of chipset, the bus between the Northbridge and Southbridge is slower, and generally has enough bandwidth to handle the bridge to PCI bus on the Southbridge (older chipsets use PCI starting from the Northbridge, and the Southbridge is just another peripheral - that is the older way of doing it). We still live in an era, where for the most part, onboard peripherals that have I/O connectors on the back of the computer, are connected to the PCI bus. PCI busses come in several speeds, and for desktop systems, PCI is still 32 bits bus width, with a maximum (theoretical) bus bandwidth of 133MB/sec. A reasonable real world bandwidth figure for PCI is 100MB/sec (bus mastering, fairly small burst size, in order to allow sharing of the bus without causing another card to be starved). Now, look at SATA. The cable used on SATA transfers data at 150MB/sec. Sounds like a great deal, a little faster than the best PATA can do. The current generation of disk drives use a bridging chip, to convert from PATA on the disk drive controller board, to the SATA serial way of doing things. I think a review I read mentioned that some of the bridge chips are limited to ATA100 parallel rates, so that is a limitation at the disk end. Eventually, there will be SATA native controllers on disk drives, in which case the bridge chip will disappear, and more of the potential of the SATA cable can be used. Whether it is in the best interest of the disk drive manufacturer, to make it work at the full 150MB/sec max rate, is something we'll know when native drives become available. This rate is only useful for bursting data into the disk drive cache, as the sustained media rates are still well below the 150MB/sec figure. At the other end of things, we have the SATA controller on the motherboard. If your board has a SIL3112 controller, it is connected to the PCI bus, so the controller itself is limited to the approx 100MB/sec max transfer rate across PCI. So, for a chip like this, even if you buy a native drive in a year's time, the max burst rate is still not going to be any better, due to the PCI bus. Many SATA chips support two drives, for a theoretical maximum of 300MB/sec. For motherboard chipsets that have SATA built in, there is the potential to connect them to an internal bus, which is running faster than the current PCI. So, when shopping, you need to check whether the SATA on the motherboard comes from the Northbridge or the Southbridge, and if it does, is it connected to a faster internal bus. An example of a faster bus, is the 266MB/sec CSA bus on an Intel 875P. This kind of architecture allows peripherals with a faster transfer rate than ordinary PCI to work at closer to their potential. Many architectural changes are coming to PC motherboards, and there will be havoc as these changes are introduced (the havoc is necessary to break free of the chicken versus egg issues of advancing past 133MB/sec PCI). It is hard to offer advice on which options are the best ones to bet on. Having any SATA interface, even if it is a little inferior, will be necessary for the day that parallel interface drives are no longer being sold everywhere. So, I wouldn't lose any sleep over the current limited implementations, as the main value of a SATA interface is it helps ensure you can buy a new drive in a few years for your "aged" motherboard. Think of SATA right now as compatibility insurance, rather than as a performance thing. SATA will become faster in the future, at which point there will be a performance advantage, assuming that someone builds a disk drive with higher media rates. But, by that time, so many other things will have changed in the PC, you'll be buying another motherboard anyway. HTH, Paul |
#4
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There is another advantage, beside the easy of instalation, and neater
hookup, and that's a dedicated 150Mb bus. Many of the boards offer SATA in addition to a RAID controller which would offer better performance for processing files, ie (Video) reading from the RAID and writing to the SATA. "Ed T Wilson" wrote in message ... A colleague of mine has advised that the current state-of-the-art chipsets supporting AMD XP processors will not provide any performance advantage over a UDMA 133 IDE hard drive. Hence, buying a SATA hard drive for my A7N8X would be a waste of money. Is that correct? Thanks for the help. |
#5
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Thanks for the explanation. It answered my question.
Ed Paul wrote: In article , Ed T Wilson wrote: A colleague of mine has advised that the current state-of-the-art chipsets supporting AMD XP processors will not provide any performance advantage over a UDMA 133 IDE hard drive. Hence, buying a SATA hard drive for my A7N8X would be a waste of money. Is that correct? Thanks for the help. The current state of affairs has less to do with the AMD versus Intel thing, than it has to do with bus architecture. A PC has a series of busses chained together, each one tuned to the needs of the peripherals that are connected to it. The fastest bus is the one between the Processor and the Northbridge, and is capable of tremendous bandwidth. Depending on the generation of chipset, the bus between the Northbridge and Southbridge is slower, and generally has enough bandwidth to handle the bridge to PCI bus on the Southbridge (older chipsets use PCI starting from the Northbridge, and the Southbridge is just another peripheral - that is the older way of doing it). We still live in an era, where for the most part, onboard peripherals that have I/O connectors on the back of the computer, are connected to the PCI bus. PCI busses come in several speeds, and for desktop systems, PCI is still 32 bits bus width, with a maximum (theoretical) bus bandwidth of 133MB/sec. A reasonable real world bandwidth figure for PCI is 100MB/sec (bus mastering, fairly small burst size, in order to allow sharing of the bus without causing another card to be starved). Now, look at SATA. The cable used on SATA transfers data at 150MB/sec. Sounds like a great deal, a little faster than the best PATA can do. The current generation of disk drives use a bridging chip, to convert from PATA on the disk drive controller board, to the SATA serial way of doing things. I think a review I read mentioned that some of the bridge chips are limited to ATA100 parallel rates, so that is a limitation at the disk end. Eventually, there will be SATA native controllers on disk drives, in which case the bridge chip will disappear, and more of the potential of the SATA cable can be used. Whether it is in the best interest of the disk drive manufacturer, to make it work at the full 150MB/sec max rate, is something we'll know when native drives become available. This rate is only useful for bursting data into the disk drive cache, as the sustained media rates are still well below the 150MB/sec figure. At the other end of things, we have the SATA controller on the motherboard. If your board has a SIL3112 controller, it is connected to the PCI bus, so the controller itself is limited to the approx 100MB/sec max transfer rate across PCI. So, for a chip like this, even if you buy a native drive in a year's time, the max burst rate is still not going to be any better, due to the PCI bus. Many SATA chips support two drives, for a theoretical maximum of 300MB/sec. For motherboard chipsets that have SATA built in, there is the potential to connect them to an internal bus, which is running faster than the current PCI. So, when shopping, you need to check whether the SATA on the motherboard comes from the Northbridge or the Southbridge, and if it does, is it connected to a faster internal bus. An example of a faster bus, is the 266MB/sec CSA bus on an Intel 875P. This kind of architecture allows peripherals with a faster transfer rate than ordinary PCI to work at closer to their potential. Many architectural changes are coming to PC motherboards, and there will be havoc as these changes are introduced (the havoc is necessary to break free of the chicken versus egg issues of advancing past 133MB/sec PCI). It is hard to offer advice on which options are the best ones to bet on. Having any SATA interface, even if it is a little inferior, will be necessary for the day that parallel interface drives are no longer being sold everywhere. So, I wouldn't lose any sleep over the current limited implementations, as the main value of a SATA interface is it helps ensure you can buy a new drive in a few years for your "aged" motherboard. Think of SATA right now as compatibility insurance, rather than as a performance thing. SATA will become faster in the future, at which point there will be a performance advantage, assuming that someone builds a disk drive with higher media rates. But, by that time, so many other things will have changed in the PC, you'll be buying another motherboard anyway. HTH, Paul |
#6
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"Ed T Wilson" wrote in message
... A colleague of mine has advised that the current state-of-the-art chipsets supporting AMD XP processors will not provide any performance advantage over a UDMA 133 IDE hard drive. Hence, buying a SATA hard drive for my A7N8X would be a waste of money. Is that correct? ? SATA's benefits are not performance related. It's better than IDE in every single way you can possibly think of - you'd be mad to buy an IDE drive instead ! Take a look here http://www.serialata.org/about/index.shtml |
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