SATA vs. IDE

In article nk.net,
says...
Very informative stuff!



If you want some numbers, Sandra says for throughput:

WD 8M buffer 120G ATA-100 26.6 Mb

WD 8M buffer SATA Raptor 34.2 Mb

2 Seagate Baracuda IV 2M
buffer 80 G
Running Raid 0 45.8 Mb

Bill

Well, I don't feel so bad then. My IDE IBM is faster than the SATA Raptor!


"Bill" wrote in message
...
In article nk.net,
says...
Very informative stuff!



If you want some numbers, Sandra says for throughput:

WD 8M buffer 120G ATA-100 26.6 Mb

WD 8M buffer SATA Raptor 34.2 Mb

2 Seagate Baracuda IV 2M
buffer 80 G
Running Raid 0 45.8 Mb

Bill

"Ransack The Elder" wrote in message rthlink.net...
"The TweakOholic" wrote in message
e.rogers.com...
If it's speed that you're after, get yourself a Western Digital Raptor
drive.

Nah. I hate WD drives. Plus 36 gigs is just not big enough for me,
especially for the outrageous prices they sell these drives for.

I'm not looking for extreme speed, I'm just looking for speed faster than
ATA/100, which is what SATA is supposed to do.

The raptor is the ONLY SATA drive to beat IDE at the moment. Most of
the models selling both SATA and IDE models are actually slower on
SATA. The raptor is based on a SCSI drive and compares very well to
other 10K RPM SCSI drives in most tests. Most are slightly slower
than SCSI but it still manages to kill any other IDE/SATA drive out
there. You still get most of the quality of SCSI as well. The drive
is very solid and has a 5 year warranty. I ordered one for my system
drive. My data goes on a normal 7200RPM IDE drive.

Eric

In article ,
says...

snip

The raptor is the ONLY SATA drive to beat IDE at the moment.

Unfortunately, that doen't seem to be the case on my machine. If you
know of some newer drivers somewhere I'd be happy to download them and
see how well they work.


snip
Eric


Bill

Ransack The Elder wrote:
First off, I realize this is not a hard drive newsgroup. However, I
never visit any hard drive groups, and I know the folks here know
what's going on so I'll ask here...plus I have an AMD system

I just upgraded to a Chaintech motherboard with the Promise SATA
controller. I WAS excited about getting my Maxtor Diamondmax 9 120
gig SATA drive going, until I benchmarked it with SiSoft Sandra. It
runs almost identical speeds as my IDE Hitachi/IBM 120 gig drive.
Both of them were almost as fast as an IDE RAID setup that Sandra had
listed to compare to. However, I expected SATA to be much faster than
IDE. So I'm quite dissapointed so far.

Why did you expect SATA drive to be faster than a standard ATA one?

My question is this: the controller has 2 SATA ports and one IDE
port. My main drive (The IBM IDE 120) is on that IDE port, and the
Maxtor SATA is of course on one of the SATA ports. Does having this
IDE drive on that controller limit the speeds to ATA/133 speed??

No. Two entirely seperate controllers.

I was planning on replacing the IDE drive with SATA, but not if it's no
faster. But if doing that will 'open the flood gates' so to speak,
I'll do it.

The speed of the drive depends on the speed of the drive, not the speed of
the controller.

I'm eager for answers, and in the meantime (when I get some time) I'm
going to move the IDE drive off the Promise controller and put it on
the other IDE ports that the board has and leave the SATA drive
dedicated to the controller and see what happens.

OK, you have to remember that the limitation of getting the data off of the
media is mechanical. The "drive" as in the mechanics is kind of a seperate
issue to the controller they use to transfer that data.

For example, SCSI drives have been rotating at 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM for
years, double what IDE drives do. The WD Raptor is effectively one of those
SCSI drives but with a SATA interface. SATA provides some features over
normal ATA, a small increase in maximum transfer rate is one, but not the
primary concern at the moment, since most drives aren't able to reach
100MB/s sustained transfers.


Ben
--
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a string...

Remember that the interface (IDE, SATA) has a speed rating that just
means, what is the maximum bandwidth available across this link? Just
about any of today's formats from UDMA 66 upwards have enough capac-
ity for very fast drives indeed, including these high-speed Raptors
and IBM's (though I have a feeling you're not reading the numbers
entirely correctly - the Raptor tops out every single performance
comparison I've seen anywhere... simply an awesome drive and I can't
wait til it's available bigger than the single-platter 36GB it is
now... but then 72 would be heaps for me and 2 of those things in a
RAID config. would be superb. They also have the lowest CPU utilisation
figures I've seen, even beating some pretty good SCSI systems - this
is another important factor for the net performance of your PC).

So anyway, you have drives that can deliver a certain amount of data
per second, and interfaces that can be up to several times faster
than this maximum rate. You only need to consider the higher-speed
interfaces if there is more than one of these fast drives on them -
for instance, 2 Raptors both going fast will use up most but not
quite all the bandwidth available on UATA 133. Putting a fatter pipe
on the drive doesn't speed the drive up, as in today's systems the
drive interface isn't limiting the transfer rates you're getting...
the drive itself on any new-ish interface will not be limited by that
pipe, and conversely, a faster pipe won't give you any boost in itself.
That said, there's potential for more efficient protocols to be im-
plemented with new formats, but I haven't heard that anything of that
sort applies with SATA vs. UDMA

Those figures we've seen in this thread were mostly peak rates, and
of course, no drive delivers this sort of rate all the time. It's
probably the case that even UDMA 66 will rarely limit what you're
getting, given the *average* throughput of the drives, although it'd
be a shame to be shackling one of these speed-demons at all when fast
controllers are available cheap as an upgrade. It's especially when
you have two drives on the one channel you start to need extra
speed, and then how often do you really have both drives under load
simultaneously, unless you're in certain RAID modes (like below)?

Me, I can't wait to RAID up a couple of Raptors and run them with
striping! I deal with some big files including multitrack audio and
DV so this would help me keep everything real-time... the low demands
on the CPU are a big bonus for this work too, although RAID causes
that figure to jump quite a lot. Still, with these drives, the end
result is still a lot better than any other ATA-based drive I've
heard of. At Tom's Hardware, there's some comparisons of these and
other drives and useful background info. about the figures. It's
plain that there are some mighty fine drives on the way and this WD
is the first of a new breed. When other companies bring out their
answers to this drive, the market will be looking very good indeed.

--
To reply remove spamblock and replace with iinet
"Ransack The Elder" wrote in message
news
Well, I don't feel so bad then. My IDE IBM is faster than the SATA Raptor!


"Bill" wrote in message
...
In article nk.net,
says...
Very informative stuff!



If you want some numbers, Sandra says for throughput:

WD 8M buffer 120G ATA-100 26.6 Mb

WD 8M buffer SATA Raptor 34.2 Mb

2 Seagate Baracuda IV 2M
buffer 80 G
Running Raid 0 45.8 Mb

Bill

Ransack The Elder wrote:
"Ben Pope" wrote in message
...
Ransack The Elder wrote:


Why did you expect SATA drive to be faster than a standard ATA one?

The first thing was the ATA/150 speed rating.

The second thing was all the benchmarks I've been reading on various
websites. They all show where a SATA drive is faster than an IDE RAID
setup, and blows a standard single P-ATA drive out of the water. My
IBM P-ATA is getting faster speeds than my Maxtor SATA, which is the
fastest SATA drive on the market (excluding the Raptor maybe).

"My IBM P-ATA", "My Maxtor SATA" - you're still talking about the interface
as if it's the drive. Which IBM? Which Maxtor? What rotional speed? What
size Cache? What average seek? The interface has nothing to do with any of
those factors, which all affect the performance of the drive. THE INTERFACE
DOES NOT DETERMINE THE SPEED OF THE DRIVE!

For example, SCSI drives have been rotating at 10,000 RPM and 15,000
RPM for years, double what IDE drives do. The WD Raptor is
effectively one of those SCSI drives but with a SATA interface.
SATA provides some features over normal ATA, a small increase in
maximum transfer rate is one, but not the primary concern at the
moment, since most drives aren't able to reach 100MB/s sustained
transfers.


Well, I'm not impressed by SATA so far.

Based on a single drive that happens to use that interface?

Especially since my PATA is
getting better speeds than the Raptor SATA drive. At least according
to Sandra and comparing the numbers to the others that folks have
posted here. I've concluded that the Hitachi/IBM drives are just that
damn good. It's speeds are far above and beyond a standard Western
Digital Caviar which is supposed to be it's competitor. Comparing my
SATA drive with a WD drive DOES show a massive speed increase for the
SATA.

I didn't realise all WD drives have all had exactly the same performance.

Clearly you still have not seperated the interface from the drive, when you
learn to do that you may be able to look objectively at different drives and
the interfaces they have. At that point you may even have a chance of
making an informed decision.

Ben
--
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a string...

In article ,
says...
Remember that the interface (IDE, SATA) has a speed rating that just
means, what is the maximum bandwidth available across this link? Just
about any of today's formats from UDMA 66 upwards have enough capac-
ity for very fast drives indeed, including these high-speed Raptors
and IBM's (though I have a feeling you're not reading the numbers
entirely correctly - the Raptor tops out every single performance
comparison I've seen anywhere...

Same here, except it's performance isn't that spectacular on my pc. It
may be a driver issue, although I'm running the latest that I know
of, 1.0.0.33 drivers. You have tried this drive on your own machine,
haven't you? Numbers I supplied were from Sandra 2003.3.9.44. I believe
they reflect throughput and not burst transfer.


simply an awesome drive and I can't
wait til it's available bigger than the single-platter 36GB it is
now... but then 72 would be heaps for me and 2 of those things in a
RAID config. would be superb.

This pc has 7 hard drives for a total of 476GBs.

4- 80GBs Seagate Baracuda IVs
1- 120GB WD Caviar
1- 36GB WD Raptor

Not counting USB 1.1/2.0, and Firewire removable drives.

Bill

snip

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 19:02:59 GMT
"Ransack The Elder" wrote:


"Ben Pope" wrote in message
...
Ransack The Elder wrote:
"Ben Pope" wrote in message
...
Ransack The Elder wrote:


Why did you expect SATA drive to be faster than a standard ATA
one?

The first thing was the ATA/150 speed rating.

The second thing was all the benchmarks I've been reading on
various websites. They all show where a SATA drive is faster than
an IDE RAID setup, and blows a standard single P-ATA drive out of
the water. My IBM P-ATA is getting faster speeds than my Maxtor
SATA, which is the fastest SATA drive on the market (excluding the
Raptor maybe).

"My IBM P-ATA", "My Maxtor SATA" - you're still talking about the
interface
as if it's the drive. Which IBM? Which Maxtor? What rotional
speed?
What
size Cache? What average seek? The interface has nothing to do
with any
of
those factors, which all affect the performance of the drive. THE
INTERFACE
DOES NOT DETERMINE THE SPEED OF THE DRIVE!


All drives are the same as I stated..the only difference is the
INTERFACE. All 7200 rpm, all 8 meg cache.

Same brand, same series, same number of platters, same access times,
etc? Same RPM and same cache size does not imply equivalence.

So since the interface has nothing to do with the speed, you are
stating that there is no difference between ATA/33, ATA/133, SCSI, and
SATA. Please explain.

"Nothing to do" is perhaps too strongly worded, but very little to do.
The limiting factors are the number of bits on a single track and the
RPM. The interface can be infinitely fast and the drive still won't be
able to move data faster than the number of bits on a track divided by
the time it takes to move that track past the head.

There is a notion that all sorts of advanced techniques are used by
modern drives to overcome that limitation, that notion is false. With
very rare exception, contemporary drives have one head per track and
read one head at a time. They don't have two heads on a single track
and they don't read all the tracks simultaneously, so the limitation is
the ability of the mechanical parts to move bits past the head.

ATA/33 can be a limitation for many contemporary drives. Very few can
fill an ATA/100 pipe for even a single revolution (as soon as seek time
is factored in the data transfer rate goes way down), and none can fill
an ATA/133 pipe. With SCSI, the bandwidth is better utilized as there
can be up to fifteen devices sharing a channel--with IDE it is at most
two and with SATA only one device is allowed on a channel.

Well, I'm not impressed by SATA so far.

Based on a single drive that happens to use that interface?


Yep. Especially since I have the fastest SATA drive on the market,
other than the Raptor. I need more than 36 gigs though..that would
hold only 2 files for me at times.




Especially since my PATA is
getting better speeds than the Raptor SATA drive. At least
according to Sandra and comparing the numbers to the others that
folks have posted here. I've concluded that the Hitachi/IBM drives
are just that damn good. It's speeds are far above and beyond a
standard Western Digital Caviar which is supposed to be it's
competitor. Comparing my SATA drive with a WD drive DOES show a
massive speed increase for the SATA.

I didn't realise all WD drives have all had exactly the same
performance.

I didn't either. Where did you read that?

--
--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

"Ben Pope" wrote in message
...
Ransack The Elder wrote:
"Ben Pope" wrote in message
...
Ransack The Elder wrote:


Why did you expect SATA drive to be faster than a standard ATA one?

The first thing was the ATA/150 speed rating.

The second thing was all the benchmarks I've been reading on various
websites. They all show where a SATA drive is faster than an IDE RAID
setup, and blows a standard single P-ATA drive out of the water. My
IBM P-ATA is getting faster speeds than my Maxtor SATA, which is the
fastest SATA drive on the market (excluding the Raptor maybe).

"My IBM P-ATA", "My Maxtor SATA" - you're still talking about the
interface
as if it's the drive. Which IBM? Which Maxtor? What rotional speed?
What
size Cache? What average seek? The interface has nothing to do with any
of
those factors, which all affect the performance of the drive. THE
INTERFACE
DOES NOT DETERMINE THE SPEED OF THE DRIVE!


All drives are the same as I stated..the only difference is the INTERFACE.
All 7200 rpm, all 8 meg cache.

So since the interface has nothing to do with the speed, you are stating
that there is no difference between ATA/33, ATA/133, SCSI, and SATA. Please
explain.






Well, I'm not impressed by SATA so far.

Based on a single drive that happens to use that interface?


Yep. Especially since I have the fastest SATA drive on the market, other
than the Raptor. I need more than 36 gigs though..that would hold only 2
files for me at times.




Especially since my PATA is
getting better speeds than the Raptor SATA drive. At least according
to Sandra and comparing the numbers to the others that folks have
posted here. I've concluded that the Hitachi/IBM drives are just that
damn good. It's speeds are far above and beyond a standard Western
Digital Caviar which is supposed to be it's competitor. Comparing my
SATA drive with a WD drive DOES show a massive speed increase for the
SATA.

I didn't realise all WD drives have all had exactly the same performance.

I didn't either. Where did you read that?