Economics of SATA hard drive

"Rod Speed" wrote in message
Merrill P. L. Worthington wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Merrill P. L. Worthington wrote
Warra wrote

Am in the UK. Running an old system which works quite well: Via 266 mobo with Duron
1800 processor and 768MB of SD-RAM.

Will upgrade the system when I need the extra power. Currently
need to add to my data storage. Don't want to get Parallel IDE
(PATA) because newer mobos will support only SATA.

Can get a 250GB Samsung hard drive (from Komplett) for about £60 inc delivery which
is a real bargain.

But a PCI SATA adaptor by Sunsway from the same dealer costs £19. It supports 2 SATA
devices. That is definitely not a bargain as it's one- third of the price of the 250 GB drive!
What a swizz!

What viable alternatives do I have?

Consider getting a PATA drive of whatever size fits your needs. When its time to move
to another motherboard, look for one that will support the hard drive. If it only has
one PATA interface, it may be possible to use it for both the hard drive and a DVD
drive. Since DVDs typically runs at 66mhz, the hard drive would probably run at that
reduced bandwidth.

Hasnt worked like that for many years now.

What "hasn't worked like that for many years now."

Your last sentence.

Drive speed? Data transfer date? DVD running at 66mhz? What?

Your last sentence. Pure pig ignorant drivel.

SATA has the potential for 150mB/sec, but drives can't read or write that fast.

66mhz, 150mB/sec, "run at that reduced bandwidth". Geez, talk about clueless.


Irrelevant to your last sentence which is pure pig ignorant drivel.

DVDs detect on my system at 66mhz.

Very likely.

Nope. (Nor 66MHz.) 33MHz, is 66MB/s is Ultra-66 ie UDMA-4.


That's faster than the hard drive read/write rate.

Presumably you mean slower.

Nah.


Yes, but the hard drive isnt limited by the speed of the
DVD and thats completely trivial to prove using HDTach.

BUT the good news is that hard drives rarely transfer data any faster than that except
for burst from cache.

Oh bull****.

Its prefectly OK for you to be wrong.

Never ever could bull**** its way out of a wet paper bag.

The fact is that except for modern drives, the read/write rate for a hard drive does not
exceed 60mB. So a parallel interface running at 66mhz would be enough to carry the data
at full rate.

Pity the hard drive doesnt run at 66Mhz.

Yes it does (run at 66MHz) actually, (on the assumption that it is Ultra133, not Ultra100).
That's one thing he got right, although completely unintentional, of course.


And you previously pig ignorantly claimed that the hard
drive would probably run at REDUCED BANDWIDTH anyway.

Sorry, but thanks for playing.

You're the one playing with your dick and fooling absolutely no one at all.

With the exception of one Ed Light, apparently.

"CBFalconer" wrote in message
"Merrill P. L. Worthington" wrote:

Rod Speed wrote:

... snip much trollish drivel ...

You should seek immediate medical and psychological help. There
are too many crosswired neurons in your head. You need help to
function in society.

Please don't even respond to Trolls.

So then why did you do the exact opposite just now.

It just encourages them.

Yes, and Merrill thanks you for that.

"chrisv" wrote in message
Ed Light wrote:

"Oscar Jones" (Ron Speed) wrote in message ...
Ed Light wrote:

Hmm I'd like to filter out belligerents. Guess I'll start with Rod.

No one gives a fly red **** what you do or do not read.

You havent managed to contribute a damned thing either.
OK -- belligerent 2. Bye. Filtering ...

Ron^Hd always respondes to a plonking with a nym-shifted response.


No, he doesn't 'always'.

No need to kill the one-time-use name.

And Oscar is not a 'one-time-use' name.

"kony" wrote in message
On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:03:22 +1000, "Rod Speed" wrote:

If we were considering a 800MHz CPU (era) system,
it would not be as much of a bottleneck to have that age
of drive on one but even considering the drives of the
Via KT266 era, those DID show the performance penalty,

Bet they didnt with a non boot drive.

Since any kind of testing would be of a synthetic bench or real world
app, not booting or running the OS, it would not matter if the boot
drive or not.


a penalty that can only be expected to be
larger with today's higher performing drive.

Bet it still wouldnt even be detectable with a proper double blind
trial without being able to use a benchmark with a non boot drive.


The difference is there. Some may perceive it and others may not,
but some won't perceive the difference between the CPU they paid
for and the next cheaper one so does that really validate perceptions?

No it does not.

A system is comprised of many subsystems. Each taken alone
may fall within a threshold of inperception but additively
each minor change will result in a system performance
increase large enough to notice by practically anyone.

In short, paying more to use a SATA card
when it ends up SLOWER is madness.

There is no slower with one HD on it. Stop harping that point.

"kony" wrote in message
On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 01:20:33 +0200, "Folkert Rienstra" wrote:
"kony" wrote in message
On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:28:59 +0200, "Folkert Rienstra" wrote:

snip

THEN the PATA card is bought, and possibly then
in PCI Express format which is a further benefit.

They aren't available now, so why would they be available then.
If you hadn't noticed, PCI IDE is being phased out now already.

PCI express cards are still being developed,

Nope, there's plenty of SATA PCIe cards around. Just no IDE ones.


There are a few, but "plenty"?

As in every major chip manufacturer has one. I don't count the rebrands.
There may not be many rebrands in the professional market that PCIe is.
There never were with PCI-X either.

I don't think so.
Having a select few cards for a given function is hardly a market saturation.

Never was with PCI-X either.

I am confident there will be multiple times as many
PCI Express cards available in the next few years.

So we see with most add-on card functionality, there is no reason to
expect otherwise with PATA cards,

Yes there is. The market is trying to tell you something.

The market tries to make $ in individual cases, there will
be cards. Wait and see.


especially since there are still quite a few new PATA products
being sold but modern motherboards are cutting back to only
one PATA channel.

Which clearly shows you what market the PATA drives are directed at.

They're directed at systems exactly like the one the OP has.

Right. So there is no market in PCIe cards for them.

I'm still in disbelief that this thread even exists, that people are
trying to make such a simple thing as buying the drive type support-
ed by the system, an order of magnitude more difficult in the end.

Then watch it from the sideline.



75MB/s is still sufficient for single drive use.
For more drives too when not reading sequentially.

Sufficent can depend on your definition, as it is still a reduction

Nope, that is not what sufficient means.

yes it is EXACTLY what sufficient means,

Nope, 75MB/s burstrate suffices (is sufficient) for a drive
with an STR below that to run without reduced performance.

everyone does not have the same criteria.

It's context sensitive, yes, but here the context is clear.

What is fast enough for one user may not
be for another, or another use/same user.


Not a problem here.



and this already seen without any other contention for bus throughput.

In the burst rate. Not in the sustained transfer rate of a single drive.

Actually I've benched drives on KT2666/333 chipsets for
sustained rate too. Same drive is noticably slower on a PCI
IDE card (in this case it was a Promise FastTrack100).

This was a while back but vaguely it was a Maxtor Plus 8 or
9 and the figures were something like 35 MB/s on the PCI
card and 52MB/s on the motherboard's southbridge integral
controller. This was before even trying to do anything else
significant on the PCI bus like network transfers or audio,
with the latter known to be effected as well.

Burstrate is the maximum obtainable STR between the drive and the
host interface, so your observations clash with the report you showed.

I have to therefor conclude that you just made that up.

"Ed Light" wrote in message news:%uGmg.252$lv.220@fed1read12
"Warra" wrote in message ...
On 22 Jun 2006, Ed wrote:

"Rod Speed" wrote

Yes, but one PATA channel may well not be enough,
most obviously if you want to have two optical drives,
you're stuffed, no where to put the PATA hard drives.

To the rescue!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822998008

Cool.

But after all this discussion, you have forgotten the first 4 words of
my OP:

"Am in the UK".

:-)

I assumed you could find something similar.

Guess not.

Maybe I should have found a link to the manufacturer.

Or you could buy a ticket and go over there and become his
personal secretary, hold his hand and nurse him until death.

"Daniel James" wrote in message
In article , Rod Speed wrote:
AT LEAST ONE OF WHICH WILL BE NEEDED FOR THE DVD BURNER.

SATA DVD-writers are available from several makers, certainly from Plextor,
Samsung, and MSI. They seem to be typically around 75% more expensive than
the equivalent PATA device; but that will change, I'm sure.

In a hypothetical future system with only one PATA connection the DVD
is likely to be SATA, so that PATA connection will be free.

In the same hypothetical future system with the DVD likely to be SATA
the PATA connection will be gone.


Nobody is claiming that SATA doesn't have a slight technical advantage,

Merrill P. Troll does.

but there is a price penalty for adopting SATA today, and no persuasive
argument to prefer it. If I were building a new system (with a motherboards
that supported it) I'd fit a SATA drive (and damn the expense), but for
upgrading an old system with no SATA interface I wouldn't think twice about
buying PATA -- I'd just do it. The chances are that that drive will have died,

or its size will seem to laughably small

Only if you bought it too small to begin with.

that there's no point in reusing it, before PATA interfaces become so rare as
to be a problem.

Cheers,
Daniel.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:09:37 +0200, "Folkert Rienstra"
wrote:


In short, paying more to use a SATA card
when it ends up SLOWER is madness.

There is no slower with one HD on it. Stop harping that point.


It is in fact slower. Were you paying attention to the
details provided in the thread?

Simple scenario:

System 1
KT266A motherboard
PCI SATA controller card
Typical budget grade HDD, 160GB Seagate SATA

System 2
KT266A motherboard (both systems same beyond drive and PCI
card)
Southbridge integral PATA
Typical budget grade HDD, 160GB Seagate PATA

System 2 will bench faster, more than a single digit %
difference if the disk subsystem is a significant bottleneck
in whatever-the-test.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:19:01 +0200, "Folkert Rienstra"
wrote:


There are a few, but "plenty"?

As in every major chip manufacturer has one. I don't count the rebrands.
There may not be many rebrands in the professional market that PCIe is.
There never were with PCI-X either.


Let's put it into a real world context.
Newegg, world's largest online seller of retail hardware.

Look for PCI Express sound cards,
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Su...SubCategory=57
45 PCI
7 USB
PCI Express? Nada

Newegg's selection of PCI Express NICs includes only 3.

Tuner/capture cards? 2

Regardless of what chips exist, what products are seen is a
reflection of the immaturity of the PCI Express addon card
market.



yes it is EXACTLY what sufficient means,

Nope, 75MB/s burstrate suffices (is sufficient) for a drive
with an STR below that to run without reduced performance.

That was only the very first link... sustained transfer
rates are also lower. I hope you didn't conclude it was
high enough performance based on only the one link because
plenty of people did have issues using PCI controller cards
in that era. Google for "Via PCI latency" or "Via PCI
controller", or here's another page, merely using the Intel
compatible version of the chipset.

http://www.tecchannel.de/ueberblick/...70/index7.html

With a single drive the issue was not exceeding the
available bandwidth of the PCI bus, it was the Via chipset.
It makes MOST single drives slower, they need not have a
sustained performance pushing the (theoretical max) PCI bus
limits. Also keep in mind that these benches were ONLY
focusing on HDD performance without concurrent use of any
other PCI devices. That will make matters worse.




This was a while back but vaguely it was a Maxtor Plus 8 or
9 and the figures were something like 35 MB/s on the PCI
card and 52MB/s on the motherboard's southbridge integral
controller. This was before even trying to do anything else
significant on the PCI bus like network transfers or audio,
with the latter known to be effected as well.

Burstrate is the maximum obtainable STR between the drive and the
host interface, so your observations clash with the report you showed.

Call it a clash, it doesn't change the fact that in a real
world test the chipset and PCI card did have a marked
reduction in performance. The result was reproduced by MANY
other people at the time (contemporary KT266A users).



I have to therefor conclude that you just made that up.


Why would I care if you conclude it? If you had bothered to
search you would find the evidence and I already KNOW having
done the benchmark.

kony wrote
Rod Speed wrote

If we were considering a 800MHz CPU (era) system,
it would not be as much of a bottleneck to have that age
of drive on one but even considering the drives of the
Via KT266 era, those DID show the performance penalty,

Bet they didnt with a non boot drive.

Since any kind of testing would be of a synthetic
bench or real world app, not booting or running the
OS, it would not matter if the boot drive or not.

What matters is how the system is to use, not some benchmark.

a penalty that can only be expected to be
larger with today's higher performing drive.

Bet it still wouldnt even be detectable with a proper double blind
trial without being able to use a benchmark with a non boot drive.

The difference is there.

What matters is whether you can actually pick it in a proper
double blind trial. If you cant, its there but irrelevant.

Some may perceive it and others may not,

And some differences are so small no one can pick them in a
proper double blind trial, so the difference is entirely academic.

but some won't perceive the difference between the CPU they paid
for and the next cheaper one so does that really validate perceptions?

No it does not.

Yes it does. If you cant pick between the alternatives in a proper double
blind trial, you are wasting your money on the more expensive system.

A system is comprised of many subsystems. Each taken
alone may fall within a threshold of inperception but additively
each minor change will result in a system performance
increase large enough to notice by practically anyone.

Irrelevant when deciding whether a PCI SATA card will work
fine in that particular elderly system and so whether it makes
more sense for the OP to buy a SATA drive so that he gets no
constraints with the new system and can buy whatever is best value.

In short, paying more to use a SATA card
when it ends up SLOWER is madness.

That is just plain wrong if you cant even pick the slower in a
proper double blind trial. It makes much more sense to get
the SATA drive so your choice of new system isnt constrained.