SATA vs. IDE

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.

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?? 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.

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.

Just an update..

I moved the IBM drive to a seperate controller, so each had their own
controller. The IBM is still a hare faster than the SATA drive, isolating it
on the controller did not help with the speed. So I can only conclude two
things now:

1) IBM drives are just that damn good. I tested some Western Digitals, and
they were much much much slower than the IBM.

2) SATA seems to be hype at this point. When my IDE drive is faster than
SATA, what else can I think?




"Ransack The Elder" wrote in message
thlink.net...
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.

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?? 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.

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.

If it's speed that you're after, get yourself a Western Digital Raptor
drive.

-------------------------
Just another Democratic Slave
NO more Corporate Government
"Ransack The Elder" wrote in message
thlink.net...
Just an update..

I moved the IBM drive to a seperate controller, so each had their own
controller. The IBM is still a hare faster than the SATA drive, isolating
it
on the controller did not help with the speed. So I can only conclude two
things now:

1) IBM drives are just that damn good. I tested some Western Digitals, and
they were much much much slower than the IBM.

2) SATA seems to be hype at this point. When my IDE drive is faster than
SATA, what else can I think?




"Ransack The Elder" wrote in message
thlink.net...
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.

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?? 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.

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.

"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.

"J.Clarke" wrote in message
...


IDE hardware that runs faster than UDMA/100 is marketing hype. The
performance limit is the ability of the mechanical parts to move bits
past the head, not the transfer rate of the interface. SATA does have
some advantages over parallel ATA, but the higher data transfer rate is
currently of no real utility.


So I should not expect SATA to be any faster than IDE? Well that sucks.

In article nk.net,
says...

"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.



Only if you put a drive on the SATA that's capable of higher that ATA-
100 transfer speeds. When you get the aureal density of a Hitatchi/IBM
drive with a rotational speed of 10,000 to 15,00 rpm platter, then you
will see an increase in data throughput. Or you could run 2 drives
striped Raid0 for an increase in speed.

Bill

"Bill" wrote in message
...
In article nk.net,
says...

"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.



Only if you put a drive on the SATA that's capable of higher that ATA-
100 transfer speeds.


Yep, I have a SATA controller and a SATA drive. Everything works fine, SATA
is just slower than IDE for some reason.

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 05:38:46 GMT
"Ransack The Elder" wrote:


"J.Clarke" wrote in message
...


IDE hardware that runs faster than UDMA/100 is marketing hype. The
performance limit is the ability of the mechanical parts to move
bits past the head, not the transfer rate of the interface. SATA
does have some advantages over parallel ATA, but the higher data
transfer rate is currently of no real utility.


So I should not expect SATA to be any faster than IDE? Well that
sucks.

Yep. Not fun to get suckered by the marketing types, is it? The
numbers you want to look at are the "Buffer to disk" transfer rate and
the average access time, which is the sum of the average seek time and
the average latency. There's also a settling time in there but it's
usually relatively small and not always available from the drive
manufacturer.

For a 250 gig 7200 RPM WD drive, the maximum buffer to disk transfer
rate is 93.5 MB/sec, while for the WD Raptor it's 102 MB/sec. Average
access time on the 250 gig drive is 13.1 ms for reads (usually longer
for writes) while for the Raptor it's 8.19 ms.

Now, those are _maximum_ transfer rates, which means that they are for
the outermost track (modern drives use Zone Bit Recording, which is a
Seagate trademark, but others use the same technology with different
names), which put more data on the longer outer tracks than on the
shorter inner ones, hence the transfer rate for the innermost tracks is
lower. It also means that they do not include any seek time. Figure
that in and the transfer rate goes _way_ down. For example, for the
raptor, the thing transfers 102 MB/sec max. Divide that by the RPM and
multiply by 60 sec/min and you end up with 61 MB per revolution, or 610
kB per track on the outermost track. Assume that the drive can switch
heads in zero time, and that any transfer reads an entire track, and you
can then read 122 MB without a seek. That transfer takes 2 revolutions
or 12 ms. Add in a seek and that goes to 20.19 ms. So you transfer 610
kB in 20.19 ms or 60 MB/sec. If you play Fun With Numbers with the
Cheetah X15, which I believe is currently the fastest drive on the
market, you get 92 MB/sec.

But it gets worse. Drives have internal formatting that is used to
allow the drive to find whatever sector it's supposed to find, and to
deal with hot-sparing, error correction, and the like. These cut into
the amount of space that is available for user data, and so into the
transfer rate available for user data. Seagate reports the maximum
formatted internal transfer rate for the Cheetah X15 as 86 MB/sec. So,
using that as the single-track transfer rate and figuring in seek time,
the performance goes down to 72 MB/sec actually available to use.






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

In article nk.net,
says...

"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.

Better objective analysis he

http://storagereview.com/

Be sure to read the 'forum[s]' for the users feedback!

The *.pdf is he

http://www.maxtor.com/en/documentati...mondmax_plus_9
_data_sheet.pdf

There appear to be two versions of the drive in the 'chain'. Newer disks
with the YAR41BW0 firmware, and older YAR41VW0 firmware versions. The
newer are "said to be" the faster/better!

Hope this helps!

BoroLad

In article m,
says...
In article nk.net,
says...

"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.

Better objective analysis he

http://storagereview.com/

Be sure to read the 'forum[s]' for the users feedback!

The *.pdf is he

http://www.maxtor.com/en/documentati...mondmax_plus_9
_data_sheet.pdf

There appear to be two versions of the drive in the 'chain'. Newer disks
with the YAR41BW0 firmware, and older YAR41VW0 firmware versions. The
newer are "said to be" the faster/better!

Hope this helps!

BoroLad


Makes sense, I had to RMA four Seagate Barracuda IV's IDE that were
slow in Raid but OK in normal usage. Seagate sent me four new ones
with updated firmware and a note saying that the drives would be slower
than 'normal' Barracuda IV's if used on a non-raid controller. shrug

Bill