SATA vs. IDE

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

You're missing the point. Before you can say This SATA drive is worse than
that PATA drive, you need to be taking into account the actual drive, not
just its interface, not just the manufacturer.

Are you sure they're exactly the same? What about areal density? Caching
algorithms? Number of platters/heads? Low-level data structures? I think
you'll find that the drives are actually quite different.

You still have not said which two drives you are comparing... Maxtor DM9
SATA and an IBM... 180GXP?

If you take the numbers from he
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/...maxtor-05.html

You'll find that the SATA DM9 beats the 180GXP in most tests.

If you take the numbers from here (which I'd prefer to do over Toms):
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...tml?i=1799&p=5

There is a comparison of those two drives, both using PATA interface (I know
your Maxtor has SATA - I'll come back to that) - the IBM wins on transfer
rate at the beginning by about 10%, but loses by about 10% at the end of the
drive. Seek is about the same. The Winstone and Sysmark benches are about
the same.

Now, what you have is NOT a native SATA drive, you have a PATA drive with a
PATA to SATA convertor chip on it - this may explain why you have
experienced some degradation in peformance over the IBM drive.
Additionally, whereas your ATA interface is built directly into your
chipset, your the data flowing through your SATA interface has to also
traverse the PCI bus (limited in TOTAL to 133Megs/s).

Do you still think you are performing a fair comparison of SATA and PATA?

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.


Thats not what I said, I said that the interface is not the limiting factor
of a drive. Obviously sticking an ATA/33 interface on the Raptor would
cripple it, but drives don't come with interfaces that limit them, generally
speaking.

There are limits on the interface, there are limits on the drive mechanism.
You can't say that a SATA drive will be faster or slower than a SCSI drive,
based purely on the interface - there are an enormous number of factors that
affect the final transfer rate you actually get.

If your interface is capable of 150MB/s and you have an 8MB cache, you're
talking something like 50ms to empty the cache, not enough to notice on
large file transfers, so what I'm saying is that even if your interface was
"only" capable of 133MB/s you're hardly going to notice the difference, are
you? Maximum sustained transfer rates of the fastest drives is around
60-70MB/s - do you think an ATA/66 interface would limit you? Not
noticeably... So an ATA/133 interface isn't, is it?

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.

Well like I've said, you aren't actually making a sensible comparison of
SATA and PATA. You're comparing 2 drives that happen to have a SATA and a
PATA interface, on your system. I'm just attempting to explain why you may
find that your SATA drive is slower then your PATA drive, even though SATA
is technically superior to PATA.

Before suggesting that SATA is worse than PATA we will have to wait for
chipsets and drives to natively support SATA, neither of which are true for
your system, but both of which are true for PATA on your system.

Cheers,

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

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

You're missing the point. Before you can say This SATA drive is worse
than
that PATA drive, you need to be taking into account the actual drive, not
just its interface, not just the manufacturer.

1) I have the fastest 120 gig SATA drive on the market..today, anyway.

2) Everything I have read and all the charts I have seen say that SATA is
faster than IDE.

3) My IDE drives are faster than my SATA drive.

So, does that mean:
A) My IDE drive are that damn good.
or
B) SATA is marketing hype that offers nothing other than a smaller cable.



Now, what you have is NOT a native SATA drive, you have a PATA drive with
a
PATA to SATA convertor chip on it - this may explain why you have
experienced some degradation in peformance over the IBM drive.
Additionally, whereas your ATA interface is built directly into your
chipset, your the data flowing through your SATA interface has to also
traverse the PCI bus (limited in TOTAL to 133Megs/s).

Ummm..okay...so let's say my SATA controller is NOT built onto my chipset. I
would need a PCI SATA card which...bada bing...traverses the PCI bus. So
what's the difference?????



Do you still think you are performing a fair comparison of SATA and PATA?

Yep. I have the same setup as those two websites you sent.





Before suggesting that SATA is worse than PATA we will have to wait for
chipsets and drives to natively support SATA, neither of which are true
for
your system, but both of which are true for PATA on your system.

So after all that you're saying that I'm right. Right now, SATA is no better
than PATA.

Not on this one, there's two installed on the main video editing
machine at a place I work. To use them I'll need to get a SATA
card as this PC only has PATA connections. But it's one of the
upgrades I'm planning on. I'm also concerned my minimal PSU won't
cut it either so I'm investigating something a little more solid.
It's just a matter of expense as to why I haven't got this stuff yet.
A new video card is a priority before storage ATM.

I'm interested to hear you're getting disappointing results.
I would think you're right about drivers... there were some early
models of these drives that were not behaving right and got poor
reviews, but I seem to remember that the ...33 drivers were the
latest. There's other things it might be, eg. DMA not enabled or
working right, driver for your SATA ports not at its best etc.

--
To reply remove spamblock and replace with iinet
"Bill" wrote in message
...


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.

Gads, that's a lot of bytes! You must be into some serious video work
I take it. Funny how new capacities appear and we all think "how would
I ever need all that?" A year or two later and it's all full to the
brim and we're needing more.
If I could justify the money I'd love to go all-SCSI - HDD's, CD, DVD,
the lot. Even then you've got to check what you're getting to make
sure things work the way you expect - for me it's CPU utilisation that's
the main attraction. Drives have really been fast enough for me every
time I've got a current-era example, but it's the hour-glasses that
get me down while they're doing things.

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

So, does that mean:
A) My IDE drive are that damn good.
or
B) SATA is marketing hype that offers nothing other than a smaller cable.

A is correct. Your IDE PATA drives are just better than the SATA example(s)
you've tried. The SATA interface itself is neither helping nor hindering
that performance, and neither is the PATA port - it's just the drives,
not the pipe.
It's fair to expect that the latest drives with the latest interface
would be the highest performers, but sadly that's simply not the case
as we've seen from the benchmarks.
For the moment, B is mostly correct too - there's no particular to SATA
in itself, especially considering that SATA controllers all hang off a
PCI buss, limiting the total throughput possible from the controller's
2 channels to the memory.
BUT, new high performance drives will more and more appear in SATA, and
when chipsets have native SATA in-built, THEN we'll have a superior
system.



Now, what you have is NOT a native SATA drive, you have a PATA drive
with
a
PATA to SATA convertor chip on it - this may explain why you have
experienced some degradation in peformance over the IBM drive.
Additionally, whereas your ATA interface is built directly into your
chipset, your the data flowing through your SATA interface has to also
traverse the PCI bus (limited in TOTAL to 133Megs/s).

Ummm..okay...so let's say my SATA controller is NOT built onto my chipset.
I
would need a PCI SATA card which...bada bing...traverses the PCI bus. So
what's the difference?????

Most chipsets' drive controllers get to send their data to and from the
host PC over a special link between the two parts of the chipset (north-
and south-bridges) which is several times faster than PCI. Use up all the
capacity of the PCI bus with any type of drive controller and you hit a
brick wall. But fast, current PATA links send that data across this faster
buss (eg. the Lightning Data Transit link on some AMD systems) and no
HDD controller will come within a bull's roar of filling those pipes.
But for all that, it's not going to be much of a problem - two of the
fastest SATA drives at once won't fill your PCI buss, and so long as
there's not too much else eating bandwidth on PCI, you won't see any
difference.

So after all that you're saying that I'm right. Right now, SATA is no
better
than PATA.

That's the end result for now. It IS a more modern, efficient protocal
which can potentially save your CPU some work, so that's a plus. Also
the fastest drives will start appearing in SATA so you'll have to have
it to use them - that's the real point of it at the moment. If you want
to use Raptors for instance, they're SATA only so you'd need it. If you're
doing fine with those great IBM's on PATA, it makes no difference to you.
Net result - either is fine... for now. SATA will win in the end, say
in a year or more.
--
To reply remove spamblock and replace with iinet

In article ,
says...
There's other things it might be, eg. DMA not enabled or
working right, driver for your SATA ports not at its best etc.



How would I enable DMA on a SATA drive? the operating system Win2000
SP4 sees it as a scsi drive.

Bill

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

You're missing the point. Before you can say This SATA drive is
worse than that PATA drive, you need to be taking into account the
actual drive, not just its interface, not just the manufacturer.

1) I have the fastest 120 gig SATA drive on the market..today, anyway.

OK, but it's still not native SATA.

2) Everything I have read and all the charts I have seen say that
SATA is faster than IDE.

Read more.

3) My IDE drives are faster than my SATA drive.

OK.

So, does that mean:
A) My IDE drive are that damn good.

Yes. BUt because it's a fast drive mechanism and good algorithms, not
because it's PATA.

B) SATA is marketing hype that offers nothing other than a smaller
cable.

No! It offers many useful things such as hot-plugging. I don't know how
many times that would have been useful for me, at least,

Now, what you have is NOT a native SATA drive, you have a PATA drive
with a PATA to SATA convertor chip on it - this may explain why you
have experienced some degradation in peformance over the IBM drive.
Additionally, whereas your ATA interface is built directly into your
chipset, your the data flowing through your SATA interface has to
also traverse the PCI bus (limited in TOTAL to 133Megs/s).

Ummm..okay...so let's say my SATA controller is NOT built onto my
chipset. I would need a PCI SATA card which...bada bing...traverses
the PCI bus. So what's the difference?????

Re-read what I said.

Do you still think you are performing a fair comparison of SATA and
PATA?

Yep. I have the same setup as those two websites you sent.

Ok, then do you think that THEY were performing a fair comparison?

Before suggesting that SATA is worse than PATA we will have to wait
for chipsets and drives to natively support SATA, neither of which
are true for your system, but both of which are true for PATA on
your system.

So after all that you're saying that I'm right. Right now, SATA is no
better than PATA.

Yes. I never disagreed with you on the end result, all I was saying was
that SATA is not inferior merely because in your system PATA happens to be
faster - I'm saying that it's a result of the drive mechanics NOT the
interface.

I've said all along that the performance of a drive is not entirely a result
of the interface it uses to connect to the computer. If a drive can do
70Megs/s max, then it can do 70Megs/s oer SCSI, SATA, PATA (ATA/100,
ATA/133)...

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

Hmm, I'm not on the work machine now and none of the PC's I can
access have 2000, but this part in particular was similar in 98SE
and XP - in the Control Panel open up System, then Hardware, Device
Manager (or however you get to it in 2000). With mine I open up
IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, right-click then choose Properties.
Select the Primary IDE Channel, Properties again, and the 2nd
tab is Advanced Settings. In there are the DMA settings in drop-
down menus. I have my CD drive on the 2nd channel, and had to go
into it to enable DMA this way when I installed it.

I had no idea about SATA being seen as a SCSI device, but then
I've heard NT, 2000 and XP do this for several types of interfaces,
much as it considers a FireWire port to be a network interface.
Unfortunately the only SCSI machines I use are Mac's so I can't
just look at one of them for you and tell you what to look for.

So does this mean you have a category in Device Manager for SCSI
controllers? I don't have one here, and that's at odds with what
someone else told me ie. that XP calls them all SCSI. Anyway, if
there's no IDE controller there that is responsible for the HDD
(apart from something controlling your CD/DVD's), look in the pages
for the SCSI controller section for DMA controls. I do remember
that in a lot of systems I've had to specifically turn DMA on as
it's not done by default. Some drivers will set this themselves
on installation but it sounds to me like yours haven't... not
unusual. I can't imagine what else is causing your drives to be
so slow.

There's also a device category for Disk Drives, which on the
systems I use doesn't affect DMA but it would be worth a look to
see exactly what options these drivers have enabled for it. If
there are any real problems, windows will tell you in one of these
categories.

In the System Devices category there's a Direct Memory Access
Controller, so check it for conflicts or problems. In the View
menu of Device Manager select View Resources by type or connection
and see if it's telling you about DMA or IRQ clashes relating
to the disk controllers. You can also run MSINFO32 (type that
name in after selecting Run... from Start menu), open up the
Hardware Resources tree and look at DMA and Conflicts/Sharing.
Most of the time, what you'll think are conflicts aren't, they're
simply shared resources (esp. higher IRQ numbers)... I'm no expert
with this information so all I can suggest is look for any alerts.
DMA conflicts usually don't cause the system to hang like IRQ
conflicts can, but they just slow things down. Amongst all this
info you might find that your drives' DMA is also assigned to
something else, and if it is, that's something I don't know if I
can sort out for you... but have a look and see what comes up.

Presumably you've tried pulling the drivers and reinstalling
them already? (remove the device from Dev. Mgr). That has solved
a lot of problems for me as the system then reassigns resources.
But have a sniff around first.
HTH...
--
To reply remove spamblock and replace with iinet
"Bill" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...
There's other things it might be, eg. DMA not enabled or
working right, driver for your SATA ports not at its best etc.



How would I enable DMA on a SATA drive? the operating system Win2000
SP4 sees it as a scsi drive.

Bill

In article ,
says...
Hmm, I'm not on the work machine now and none of the PC's I can
access have 2000, but this part in particular was similar in 98SE
and XP - in the Control Panel open up System, then Hardware, Device
Manager (or however you get to it in 2000). With mine I open up
IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, right-click then choose Properties.
Select the Primary IDE Channel, Properties again, and the 2nd
tab is Advanced Settings. In there are the DMA settings in drop-
down menus. I have my CD drive on the 2nd channel, and had to go
into it to enable DMA this way when I installed it.

Oh, PATA works. No problem with Win2000 SP3 and SP4 enabling DMA.


I had no idea about SATA being seen as a SCSI device, but then
I've heard NT, 2000 and XP do this for several types of interfaces,
much as it considers a FireWire port to be a network interface.
Unfortunately the only SCSI machines I use are Mac's so I can't
just look at one of them for you and tell you what to look for.

Yup, wonderfulness from Redmond. If it's not EIDE it's SCSI, or
something else.



So does this mean you have a category in Device Manager for SCSI
controllers?

Yup. And no actual SCSI devices.

I don't have one here, and that's at odds with what
someone else told me ie. that XP calls them all SCSI.

No XP here, soon as I learn enough about Linux, Win2000 goes away as
well.

Anyway, if
there's no IDE controller there that is responsible for the HDD
(apart from something controlling your CD/DVD's), look in the pages
for the SCSI controller section for DMA controls.

Scsi doesn't have DMA. AS far as I know, neither does SATA.

I do remember
that in a lot of systems I've had to specifically turn DMA on as
it's not done by default.

Yup, true for many versions of Windows.

Some drivers will set this themselves
on installation but it sounds to me like yours haven't... not
unusual. I can't imagine what else is causing your drives to be
so slow.

Um, I think I've got you confused, the PATA drives work great, ot's
the SATA WD Raptor that's pokey, and that may still be a driver
problem.



There's also a device category for Disk Drives, which on the
systems I use doesn't affect DMA but it would be worth a look to
see exactly what options these drivers have enabled for it. If
there are any real problems, windows will tell you in one of these
categories.

Looked, no help there.


In the System Devices category there's a Direct Memory Access
Controller, so check it for conflicts or problems. In the View
menu of Device Manager select View Resources by type or connection
and see if it's telling you about DMA or IRQ clashes relating
to the disk controllers. You can also run MSINFO32 (type that
name in after selecting Run... from Start menu), open up the
Hardware Resources tree and look at DMA and Conflicts/Sharing.
Most of the time, what you'll think are conflicts aren't, they're
simply shared resources (esp. higher IRQ numbers)...

MSINFO32 says the sata controller is sharing IRQ 18 with the Promise
Fastrak 100 TX4 Raid controller. I don't think this is a problem
though.


I'm no expert
with this information so all I can suggest is look for any alerts.
DMA conflicts usually don't cause the system to hang like IRQ
conflicts can, but they just slow things down. Amongst all this
info you might find that your drives' DMA is also assigned to
something else, and if it is, that's something I don't know if I
can sort out for you... but have a look and see what comes up.


No conflicts or any other discrepencies found. As soon as I order
another board with a SATA drive on it, I'll see if the Raptor flies any
faster on it.

Bill

If you want to really boost your PC's performance, try this.

1) Move your paging file from the Windows boot volume to the new SATA drive
(D: I assume).
2) Move your most used applications to the D: drive.

The more you can get both drives working at the same time, the better your
performance will be. Instead of the max data rate for a single drive, you
can realize more of the max data rate of both drives (theoretical 2x max of
a single drive). You won't get 2x performance but you may be able to
realize better than max of a single drive.


"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.
|
|
|
|
|

I had no idea about SATA being seen as a SCSI device, but then
I've heard NT, 2000 and XP do this for several types of interfaces,
much as it considers a FireWire port to be a network interface.
Unfortunately the only SCSI machines I use are Mac's so I can't
just look at one of them for you and tell you what to look for.

Yup, wonderfulness from Redmond. If it's not EIDE it's SCSI, or
something else.



So does this mean you have a category in Device Manager for SCSI
controllers?

Yup. And no actual SCSI devices.

I don't have one here, and that's at odds with what
someone else told me ie. that XP calls them all SCSI.

No XP here, soon as I learn enough about Linux, Win2000 goes away as
well.

Anyway, if there's no IDE controller there that is responsible for the HDD
(apart from something controlling your CD/DVD's), look in the pages
for the SCSI controller section for DMA controls.

Scsi doesn't have DMA. AS far as I know, neither does SATA.

Hmmm....SCSI has had DMA transfers for at least the last 15 years.
My all SCSI systems use DMA and this is set from the SCSI BIOS
(no doubt Windows also has the DMA settings switch and, not being a
Win user I would have to experiment to see if Win ignored the BIOS
settings or not. No doubt another person could advise better on this.


Regards,

Kevin
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