Economics of SATA hard drive

kony wrote
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.

And if you cant even pick between those two configs in a proper
double blind trial, it makes much more sense to go the SATA drive
route SO YOUR CHOICE OF NEW SYSTEM ISNT CONSTRAINED
and so the new system will be completely bog standard with the
SATA drive as the boot drive in the new system and you dont have
to find and implement a PCI Express PATA card for the PATA boot drive.

Daniel James wrote:
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.

Yes, but most of us prefer to go the ATAPI route with those,
because that give you lots more choice and much better value.

They seem to be typically around 75% more
expensive than the equivalent PATA device;

And there is no point in paying that.

but that will change, I'm sure.

But not necessarily by the time he wants to buy the new system.

In a hypothetical future system with only one
PATA connection the DVD is likely to be SATA,

You dont know that, or when that will be the case either.

so that PATA connection will be free.

You dont know that either. In spades if he decides
he wants a pair of optical drives for whatever reason.

DVD burners are now so cheap that it can make a lot of
sense to have more than one for convenient copying of
DVDs and when there is still quite a bit of variation in
how well particular burners cope with particular media.
It can make sense to have more than one just so you
can use any media that turns up with no hassles etc.

Nobody is claiming that SATA doesn't have a slight technical
advantage, but there is a price penalty for adopting SATA
today, and no persuasive argument to prefer it.

Wrong when you buy the SATA drive SO YOUR CHOICES
WITH THE NEW SYSTEM ARENT CONTRAINED AT ALL.

If I were building a new system (with a motherboards that
supported it) I'd fit a SATA drive (and damn the expense),

There is **** all expense difference now.

but for upgrading an old system with no SATA interface
I wouldn't think twice about buying PATA -- I'd just do it.

More fool you. Some of us prefer to have more choice
with the new system and going SATA provides that.

The chances are that that drive will have died,

Oh bull****.

or its size will seem to laughably small
that there's no point in reusing it,

More bull****. Depends entirely on how soon he will be getting the new system.

before PATA interfaces become so rare as to be a problem.

They dont have to be 'so rare' to be a nuisance, there are already
motherboards with just one PATA interface and that is a significant
limitation on what can be done conveniently on that system drive wise.

chrisv wrote
Rod Speed wrote

I have 2 systems with two PCI PATA cards in them
currently. Cables are quite manageable if one merely
chooses the right length of cable, rounded if desirable.

No thanks, I'm not stupid enough to flout the ATA standard.

You dont need to with SATA.

You ignore his point that cables are quite manageable.

No I didnt. And I was JUST commenting on how likely it is
that anyone WILL BOTHER TO DEVELOPE A PCI Express
RAID card for PATA drives due to the cable mess WITH THOSE.

Period. Even with flat PATA cables.

Wrong, as always.

kony wrote
Folkert Rienstra wrote
kony wrote
Folkert Rienstra wrote

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"? I don't think so. Having a
select few cards for a given function is hardly a market
saturation. I am confident there will be multiple times as
many PCI Express cards available in the next few years.

Bet there will be **** all PCI Express RAID cards for PATA drives.

The market for PCI Express RAID cards will be quite small just
because most decent motherboards have optional RAID and there
are significant advantages with having that functionality built in, so
only a fool would bother to design a PCI Express RAID cards for
PATA drives when the main market for addon PCI Express RAID
cards will be those who need more than the motherboard RAIDs
provide. And they wont be interested in PATA drives because
of the cable mess alone, let alone the lack of hot swap etc.

It wouldnt surprise me if no one bothers.

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.

Not interested in waiting, I'll go for the SATA drive now
and am absolutely guaranteed to be able to use it as the
boot drive in the new system with no farting around at all.

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.

Nope. The single PATA channel is for the
optical drives which are mostly still PATA.

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 supported by the system,
an order of magnitude more difficult in the end.

Doesnt surprise me at all that dills like you are silly enough
to constrain the choices with the new system by getting a
PATA drive now when they have passed their useby date.

You cant even buy the most recently released Samsung
400G in PATA format and if you want one of their drives
because they are nice and quiet, you are stuck with the 300G.

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, that is not what sufficient means.

everyone does not have the same criteria.

No one ever said they do.

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

If you cant even pick the difference with a proper
double blind trial, its clearly sufficient for everyone.

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).

And I bet the user wont even be able to pick it in
a proper double blind trial if it aint the boot drive.

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.

And I bet the user wont even be able to pick it in
a proper double blind trial if it aint the boot drive.

So with a pci card could he still make 20 Mb/S? That would be ok until he
upgraded his motherboard.


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"chrisv" wrote

You ignore his point that cables are quite manageable. Period. Even
with flat PATA cables.

Except flat cables can impede air flow and round ones are stiff and
sometimes have to be tied away from contact with heatsinks, etc.

But still manageable.


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


chrisv wrote:

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
need to kill the one-time-use name.


Rug Spud doesn't have any more to say. His statements contradict
published objective testing results using real-world systems. He even
contradicts hiimself.

He's lost this round and proven he doesn't have any clue about hard drive
performance. He's probably just some 14-year-old kid.

It's a shame because this newsgroup has been very neat for years. Perhaps
he'll get totally filtered out.


--
Ed Light

Smiley :-/
MS Smiley :-\

Send spam to the FTC at

Thanks, robots.

Bring the Troops Home:
http://bringthemhomenow.org

"kony" wrote in message
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?

What, the part that you made up?


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.

What a load of gibberish.

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006 03:10:20 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

kony wrote
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.

And if you cant even pick between those two configs in a proper
double blind trial,


Who said "you" couldn't pick?
That has not been established. So far the ONLY evidence
presented are the links I have provided that clearly show it
WILL BE SLOWER.

This is leap #1 you need to make the point.

it makes much more sense to go the SATA drive
route

Actually there is only one possible scenario where the SATA
drive makes the most sense...

IF:

1) User doesn't care about the performance, AND

2) User doesn't mind paying more for lower performance, AND

3) User does eventually install the drive in the next
system, actually DOES it, not just thinks about it, AND

4) Next system did only have one IDE channel instead of 2,
so only 2 device support, AND

5) User also wanted more than one other PATA device
installed, which would have to assume the first device were
a PATA ATAPI drive?? OR there is already yet another PATA
device being transferred, AND YET there is still the one
PATA position open even on the least # of PATA channels, 1.
Now consider that user's next board may have 2 channels, or
he may transfer an existing PATA PCI card and then will
have PLENTY of PATA channels.

So far we already have 5 specific conditions necessary to
benefit even the slightest bit eventually, but having to
suffer the performance penalty now no matter what. Then
there's PAYING to do that... Most people would want to be
PAID to do that.



SO YOUR CHOICE OF NEW SYSTEM ISNT CONSTRAINED
and so the new system will be completely bog standard with the
SATA drive as the boot drive in the new system and you dont have
to find and implement a PCI Express PATA card for the PATA boot drive.


You're out of your mind.
For all we know that next system will have a new drive
bought at that time and the current drive being considered
isn't used at all or in a secondary role.

The only thing known for certain right now is:

- Drive connected to the southbridge controller will be
faster, all else being equal (choosing same relative product
tiered drive in PATA vs SATA interface).

- System natively supports one but not the other and by
your own terms is a "dinosaur" which makes less and less
sense to be buying more cards for, particularly when
unnecessary.

I see you just don't understand, and I'm ok with that. I
have presented one option and leave it to the OP to decide
since we will clearly not come to an agreement on this.

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006 03:06:54 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

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.

YES!!

That is EXACTLY why the PCI SATA card is such a horrible
idea. In anything but the synthetic benchmark, the PCI bus
will be playing a more significant role in performance
degradation. The synthetic bench where only the drive was
being accessed is just the tip of the iceburg. By adding
the SATA card the OP could easily have OTHER devices that
are currently working fine, begin misbehaving in addition to
the slower but more costly new drive inclusion.


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.



Nobody every concluded it wouldn't be possible. It "might"
not be possible, I did play devil's advocate for a moment
previously, but ultimately the only evidence is that it WILL
be slower, and that plenty of people DID NOTICE. There are
hundreds of thousands of search engine hits... not just
some random keywords that happened to show up on the same
page, but specficially about the Via PCI issue and it's
manifestation when using addon PCI cards like drive
controllers.

WHERE IN THE WORLD WERE YOU DURING THIS ERA??
It was common knowledge.