Economics of SATA hard drive

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 03:54:12 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

Peter van der Goes wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Warra wrote

Find a cheaper PCI SATA adaptor on ebay.

Question, as our IT support wants to put a SATA drive in my office PC by using such an
adaptor, is there a performance penalty involved because the adaptor uses the PCI bus?

Yes, but his is an older system where you wont notice anything.



It's not THAT old. HDD is the primary bottleneck on many
common uses of a PC even back in the ~ 800MHz CPU era.

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, we can see this
with any kinds of add-on cards that the 3rd party cards are
trailing behind the motherboard adoption of PCI Express
supportive chipsets. So far only video cards have made a
significant transition, enough to expect a good choice of
technology from most manufacturers.

So we see with most add-on card functionality, there is no
reason to expect otherwise with PATA cards, especially since
there are still quite a few new PATA products being sold but
modern motherboards are cutting back to only one PATA
channel.




If you Google,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...ATA+benchmarks

look at the very first hit, it happens to be KT266A...
http://www.tecchannel.de/ueberblick/...70/index3.html

... and this is even BEFORE one tries to use the PCI bus for
other concurrent things like audio or whatever.

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 and this already seen without any other contention
for bus throughput. Now more than ever people are building
HTPC or other special needs that can have an impact.

Recall that at that time even using an sound card from the
most popular manufacturer caused a problem, when a PCI IDE
card was used. We haven't even considered any other
devices yet.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 04:18:25 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:


yes, that's why if/when the time comes after that next
system is purchased, one could buy the PCI IDE card.

Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a
PCI SATA card now. No point in crippling the new decent
performance system by having the hard drives on a PCI card.

It makes sense to buy a drive that uses the interface the
system supports.

If we are considering that NEXT system, at that point in the
future the best performance won't come from a drive bought
today either, it will come from this future drive
technology, or actually, a combination of two drives.

Further we have not established that the drive bought today
will actually need a PCI PATA card on that next system... it
was just a random speculation as a justification to buy
something the user may never need- any kind of PCI
controller card.




Actually, I'd expect by that time there would be
PCI Express PATA cards in the market enough
for them to be price-competitive and choose
that over the 32bit/33Mhz PCI alternative.

Unlikely to be price competitive to a PCI SATA card now
since there will be little demand for PCI Express PATA cards.

Oh? One would think there isn't a lot of demand for PCI
PATA cards since all boards had them for years, and yet they
are in the market at $15. There is no reason to believe
they won't be price conpetitive as they are not an
inherantly expensive product to make.



Yes, it is a sad irony that with all the great transitions going
on, many people are left with less versatile systems for their
real-world uses. I still look for boards with maximum # of
PCI slots, particularly towards the bottom of the board so
they aren't conflicting with good video card cooling if utilized.

That does radically limit your choices tho, particularly
if you want a competitively priced motherboard.



Yes it does, but if you don't buy a board with a fair # of
slots, the functionality of the system may likewise be
radically reduced, especially for some of us here who
already have myriad PCI cards.


And I dont have many cards at all in the newer systems now,
essentially because everything comes standard except for a
gaming class video card and I dont even bother with those,
tho I do add a decent dual head video card to all systems now.

Things come standard but not necessarily with the features
or performance one will want. Many don't buy or upgrade a
system merely to get another few % performance increase on
CPU/etc but they want to raise or at least retain the other
positive system attributes they'd previously enjoyed such as
video capture, high quality (not just paper spec) sound,
eSATA ports.



Since PATA channel(s) on still on new boards and backwards compatible,

Not necessarily enough of them tho. If you want two
optical drives, you're stuffed if its only got one IDE port.

.... or you just buy the PCI PATA card as already mentioned,
just not a RAID card if the particular specimen won't
support ATAPI.




Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a PCI SATA
card now, off ebay, from a retail operation that sells on ebay.

Why would you bother with eBay when everyone and their
brother sells low cost SATA cards? Seems like an
unnecessary risk to me, especially when the # of sellers
stocking them is SO great that the purchase can be combined
with some other parts order to reduce if not eliminate the
shipping cost (which would tend to be about 1/4 the cost of
the card).



Nope, we don't know that OP would ever need to buy a card at all.

Unlikely that he'll be happy with just one hard drive and one
optical drive. He's already got more than that in his dinosaur.

If he has these drives already, all the more reason to have
the PATA card in the new system to reuse them.

If he needs MORE drives in the next system, the obvious
choice once he HAS the new system is the SATA as it is then
natively supported.




It's entirely conceivable that if a PATA drive were bought
today, next system will have one free PATA position... or
at worst, THEN the PATA card is bought, and possibly
then in PCI Express format which is a further benefit.

Makes a lot more sense to cripple the dinosaur,
not the new one and not limit which motherboard
you can use in the new system.

SATA over PCI is often slower too.

Sure, but its a slow old dinosaur anyway, bet he wont even notice.

Actually for common tasks his system is plenty fast enough
to make the HDDs performance a bottleneck. Once you go over
a few hundred MHz CPU, HDD is the primary bottleneck for web
surfing, email, many office tasks... essentially all the
more common uses of a PC, even loading the OS.




Looking beyond the synthetic benchmarks, most people
have nic or sound, etc, on their PCI bus already.

Most people are irrelevant, what matters is what he has in his dinosaur.

His system could end up faster if properly set up than a
brand new one that was crippled to the PCI limits of the Via
chipset and a PCI controller card. That is, at most common
tasks. We could surely come up with some hypothetical use
that stressed the CPU or other subsystem more, but most
common tasks won't.



It can be expected at least 15% slower in many uses,

And if its not the boot drive, I bet he wont even notice that.

If it is only used for supplimental storage and there are no
large files being used, such as video editing, that is
likely true. It's still a waste of money for the SATA card
though.



that's significant enough to perceive when the
HDD is already the bottleneck for many uses.

Not when its not the boot drive.

Maybe. We will have to assume he's installing the drive to
actually use it somehow... so ultimately that use will
dictate whether it's significant.




In other words, your board is among the
worst to use a PCI SATA controller on.

Oh bull****.

Have you ever actually TRIED a PCI card on that chipset?

Yep, its quite feasible.

It's significantly slower... and at additional cost, and
having to add the PCI card. Worst possible solution all
"just in case" he'll want to reuse the drive AND "IF" he
manages to use up all the next systems PATA positions, AND
"IF" there weren't any better PCI Express card alternatives
at this point in the future. So many "IFS" that it becomes
a shot in the dark whether there will ever be a realized
benefit, but already there are clear detractions from the
SATA card.



I have... benched it too. Don't recall the scores but
did recall the very significant difference in use of a
PCI controller on that and prior, next gen Via chipsets.

Sure, but its already a slow old dinosaur, that isnt
going to change with a non boot drive on a PCI card.

Actually it's not so slow for most uses, except the primary
bottleneck- the hard drive.



Google for the info if you don't believe,

If you Google,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...ATA+benchmarks

look at the very first hit, it happens to be KT266A...
http://www.tecchannel.de/ueberblick/...70/index3.html

... and this is even BEFORE one tries to use the PCI
bus for other concurrent things like audio or whatever.

Its a slow old dinosaur, no news.

In computing most things are typical, but occasionally
some things stand out as very good or bad. Via
chipsets PCI performance in that era were very bad.

Bull****, they're just mediocre performers.



.... if by mediocre you really mean "the most significant
performance limit to a modern HDD possible" then perhaps so.
Putting a SATA card or ATA133 card on the PCI bus of that
Via chipset will be slower than an ATA66 southbridge
controller in actual use. IF there were some gain in going
the SATA route we could weigh the pros and cons but there is
no actual gain, only a theory that some day in a certain
situation it "might" have the potential to be a gain. That
is such a stretch it isn't even reasonable.

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 21:38:20 +0100, "Alex Fraser"
wrote:

"kony" wrote in message
.. .
There is no problem doing it, IDT (independant device
timing) means the HDD will run at full speed unless the
optical was a PIO drive.

I used to have an early Zip drive (PIO 1 at best) on the same cable as an
UDMA 100 HDD, attached to a UDMA 66-capable motherboard. There did not seem
to be any measurable impact on HDD performance while the Zip drive was idle.

Alex



I've heard of others not having problems in similar
arrangements but vaguely recall that some did... not sure
what the real issue was there, but a PIO drive did seem to
be worse than any UDMA mode. At this point in time I'm
apathetic about finding out why since there are no modern
PIO devices anyone would want to use (AFAIK).

Folkert Rienstra wrote:
"Rod Speed" wrote in message

.... snip ...

No it isnt, its just plain wrong.

Clueless, as always.
He made his previous post 'relevant' where Horst**** thought it
wasn't. In that post he proved that Merrill P. Troll was wrong
in several counts.

It's all in the sig.

--

+-------------------+ .:\:\:/:/:.
| PLEASE DO NOT F :.:\:\:/:/:.:
| FEED THE TROLLS | :=.' - - '.=:
| | '=(\ 9 9 /)='
| Thank you, | ( (_) )
| Management | /`-vvv-'\
+-------------------+ / \
| | @@@ / /|,,,,,|\ \
| | @@@ /_// /^\ \\_\
@x@@x@ | | |/ WW( ( ) )WW
\||||/ | | \| __\,,\ /,,/__
\||/ | | | jgs (______Y______)
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\//\/\\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
================================================== ============

fix (vb.): 1. to paper over, obscure, hide from public view; 2.
to work around, in a way that produces unintended consequences
that are worse than the original problem. Usage: "Windows ME
fixes many of the shortcomings of Windows 98 SE". - Hutchison

Rod Speed wrote:


Makes more sense to do it the other way, buy a SATA drive
and a SATA PCI card, because that will be used only in the
dinosaur that wont be that fast anyway. No point in crippling
the speed of the hard drives in a new fast system by having
them on a PCI card.

What kind of advantage do you think SATA has over IDE? Does it have any
other than the size of the cable?

Do you think SATA drives are faster than PATA? Do you think SATA drives
use the entire bandwidth available on a SATA connection for data
transfer? Do you think PATA drives use the entire nbandwidth available
on a PATA connection. Do you think there's a speed advantage of SATA
drives over PATA drives?

What is the max read/write rate of any hard drive? Does it exceed the
speed of PATA? SATA? Is it close?

Rod Speed wrote:

kony wrote

Merrill P. L. Worthington wrote


Ya think? Prove it.


no need to prove what is common knowledge.


There is no problem doing it, IDT (independant
device timing) means the HDD will run at full
speed unless the optical was a PIO drive.


And its trivial to prove anyway, just use a decent benchmark
like HDTach with and without the DVD drive on the cable.

And if you have enough of a clue to be using a DVD burner
because they are so cheap now that its not worth bothering
with DVD readers anymore, plenty of those are ATA100 anyway.

So with your continual personal contradictions, do you think anybody is
actually doing much more than laughing at your posts?

I think its great entertainment. Keep it up!!

kony wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Peter van der Goes wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Warra wrote

Find a cheaper PCI SATA adaptor on ebay.

Question, as our IT support wants to put a SATA drive in my office
PC by using such an adaptor, is there a performance penalty
involved because the adaptor uses the PCI bus?

Yes, but his is an older system where you wont notice anything.

It's not THAT old. HDD is the primary bottleneck on many
common uses of a PC even back in the ~ 800MHz CPU era.

Yes, but the PCI bus isnt when the drive is on a PCI card.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 08:42:57 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

kony wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Peter van der Goes wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Warra wrote

Find a cheaper PCI SATA adaptor on ebay.

Question, as our IT support wants to put a SATA drive in my office
PC by using such an adaptor, is there a performance penalty
involved because the adaptor uses the PCI bus?

Yes, but his is an older system where you wont notice anything.

It's not THAT old. HDD is the primary bottleneck on many
common uses of a PC even back in the ~ 800MHz CPU era.

Yes, but the PCI bus isnt when the drive is on a PCI card.


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

"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.

we can see this with any kinds of add-on cards that the 3rd party
cards are trailing behind the motherboard adoption of PCI Express
supportive chipsets.

So far only video cards have made a significant transition,

Yet there are SAS PCIe cards, Sata PCIe cards and other new
technology PCIe cards. Only the old technology cards are missing.

enough to expect a good choice of technology from most manufacturers.

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.

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.





If you Google, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...ATA+benchmarks

look at the very first hit, it happens to be KT266A...
http://www.tecchannel.de/ueberblick/...70/index3.html

... and this is even BEFORE one tries to use the PCI bus for
other concurrent things like audio or whatever.

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.

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.

Now more than ever people are building HTPC or other special
needs that can have an impact.

So what does simultanious access to multiple drives and
needs the full bandwidth that those drives are capable of?


Recall that at that time even using an sound card from the
most popular manufacturer caused a problem, when a PCI IDE
card was used. We haven't even considered any other devices yet.