# ATA 133 vs. SATA 3 performance?



## jpierce55 (Jan 26, 2008)

How much performance increase is there? I see SATA drives keep getting cheaper and here I am with an old ata 133. Is it worth the upgrade? Should I just wait until the old drive dies?

I have built pc's with SATA drives, but not systems that are very fast, and not with mobo's that support the 3gb speed, so I don't have a good comparison.

My Maxtor drive is starting to get noisy, I don't know if it is the faster pc speeds, or it is getting ready to croak.

I am between these two drives if I upgrade:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145124
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

From what everyone has told me, I would suggest the Seagate, but I'm not an expert.


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

There is only Sata 1 (aka sata 150) and sata II (aka Sata 300), just to clarify.


The speed difference between IDE and sata is nothing - the difference is that the latest drives are only on sata, so obviously the fastest ones arent on IDE.

Between those two i would choose the seagate, as they have a great warranty and i personally dont know hitachi drives.

If you can spend a bit more, the samsung 500GB is a lot faster and better value for money.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

Which Samsung?


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

they only have one 500GB model. - it wasnt in the links he offered, it was merely a suggestion.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive???


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

yeah that would be the one.

Not too sure on open box ones - about 1/500 samsungs have a whine/rattle, and newegg seems to resell these as open box because they 'still work' (the problem is very rare - i've only seen it on one drive on over 50 i've used/sold personally, and searching for info about it online shows that it is very uncommon)


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

Well, what happens if you get one? You can't give it back?


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

well if you give it back, it costs you shipping - and newegg sell it (again) as open box... just saying the odds are higher on getting a bad one if its open box.

Open box means someone returned it, so its quite likely something minor is wrong with it.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

They don't test them?


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

no. Newegg would plug it in and see if a PC detects it, i doubt they'd go further than that.

The problem i speak of (someone else on TPU a week or two ago did this) is he bought a open box samsung which had the whine. You can return it, but it still WORKS. Its spins up, data goes on and off - its just noisy as heck instead of silent. newegg dont care about anything as long as it works, so they just sell it off again as open box.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

Ah, I see.


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## panchoman (Jan 26, 2008)

samsung f1's are the best 7200rpm drives you can get right now.. 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152100
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152102

but as you can see they are a little expensive due to the fact that those are the only 2 capacities avaliable on newegg at the moment.. but i'd definently grab that seagate. sata allows faster data transfer.. but not that big of a performance over ide if you're using curddy drives on both. however ssd's and higher rpm drives will definently get bottlenecked by the ide/ata/pata interface.


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

i have not seen or used the samsung F1 drive before. My experience only goes upto 500GB drives.


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## panchoman (Jan 26, 2008)

F1's are relatively new.. you can read a review here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/samsung_overtakes_with_a_bang/


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

I'm not too concerned about speed with the 500.


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

the 500's are the fastest i've used, except for a raptor. They are full of win and awesome in every category.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

COolL!


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## panchoman (Jan 26, 2008)

yeah, i'd get a samsung 500 g if you can!


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

Ok


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## Threeflow (Jan 26, 2008)

You won't see a huge difference in transfer speeds between your ATA133 drive and a new SATA drive.

Although on paper, the difference going from 133 to 300 would make a difference, in reality it is the drives themselves that are physically limited by how fast they spin, rather than the bandwidth available for them to transfer data to the motherboard.
Think of it like this:
You have a 4-lane highway, with traffic flowing at 100km/h, there are no traffic jams, no congestion, in fact there's even room to add more cars to the highway without the other cars having to slow down.
Then you expand the highway, you widen it, making it 6 lanes, or 8 lanes. Same amount of traffic... but they had enough room before, so they still move at 100km/h, their top speed.

The lanes represent the bandwidth (IDE/SATA), the cars represent the throughput (or transfer rate) of data.


Most modern hard drives seem to reach a throughput of around 80MB/sec or so, though of course that varies depending on model. As technology progresses (which it does so at a rather rapid pace in the storage industry, what with Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording, etc), these speeds will continue to rise.

If you put two or more hard drives in a high-performance RAID array, such as RAID 0 or RAID 5, then you could surpass the available bandwidth offered by ATA133, and bottleneck your speeds.
As I type this I am currently building my fileserver which will house 7 hard drives, 6 of which will be in a RAID 5 array, and I sure wouldn't want to use anything other than SATAII hard drives to makes sure I'm not bottlenecking my performance! Not to mention that if I were using IDE drives, I'd have to deal with a maze of ATA cables everywhere!


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## BrooksyX (Jan 26, 2008)

Mussels said:


> The problem i speak of (someone else on TPU a week or two ago did this) is he bought a open box samsung which had the whine. You can return it, but it still WORKS. Its spins up, data goes on and off - its just noisy as heck instead of silent. newegg dont care about anything as long as it works, so they just sell it off again as open box.



Yep that was me who got the noisy drive. I bought an open box 320 gb spinpoint samsung (same drive internals) and the thing was so loud. The seek noise drove me crazy . It was probably the reason it got returned in the first place. That being said the drive was extremely fast and if it wasn't for the noise I would have kept it. I would suggest getting a new drive instead of an open box. You won't regret it.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

Threeflow said:


> You won't see a huge difference in transfer speeds between your ATA133 drive and a new SATA drive.
> 
> Although on paper, the difference going from 133 to 300 would make a difference, in reality it is the drives themselves that are physically limited by how fast they spin, rather than the bandwidth available for them to transfer data to the motherboard.
> Think of it like this:
> ...



That, my friend, makes sense. Do you think I should do a raid0 Or 5 configuration? I mean if 2x 500gig HDs can beat 1 10k HD, then I might consider just getting the 2x 500s!



BrooksyX said:


> Yep that was me who got the noisy drive. I bought an open box 320 gb spinpoint samsung (same drive internals) and the thing was so loud. The seek noise drove me crazy . It was probably the reason it got returned in the first place. That being said the drive was extremely fast and if it wasn't for the noise I would have kept it. I would suggest getting a new drive instead of an open box. You won't regret it.



I'm so sorry!


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

Threeflow said:


> lots of writing





Most modern drives cap out around 55MB/s sustained.

The samsung i mentioned, i've had at 70MB/s sustained.

I said earlier i think (Agreeing with you) that while SATA is no faster than IDE, sata has two advantages.

Modern drives only come on sata: therefore the fastest drives are SATA ones. Its the drive, not the interface thats faster.

Something NEW for ya: IDE only came on PCI. Sata comes on PCI-E buses. This means IDE had to share 133MB/s total between itself and all other PCI devices, while PCI-E has its ownd\ dedicated bandwidth.

Therefore, SATA is faster in systems with lots of devices, or lots of drives.


P.S - one bit of semi-faulty logic on your raid setup. IDE or sata doesnt matter, even if you used two drives per cable on IDE, thats 133MB/s between two drives on that cable - its not like all the drives are fighting for the same bandwidth on the one cable  My previous statement about PCI bus still holds here, so if you're doing this please dont do it on PCI sata cards, it will only make you sad.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

So, don't do RAID on SATA?


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

Franklinwallbrown said:


> So, don't do RAID on SATA?



lol, you're missing context.

SATA is good. IDE is good. its whats feeding them.

IDE runs on the PCI bus - which SHARES with all other PCI devices (onboard sound, LAN, etc)

SATA generally runs on PCI-E. Onboard devices on modern motherboards can be PCI-E (commonly only SATA-II and gigabit lan)
The problem is that i have seen people use PCI add on cards to add 2-4 more SATA-II ports in a system, and being on PCI they fight for bandwidth just like IDE... go PCI-E or dont bother.
My storage system is the end result of many tests by me, trying to find out why things just werent as fast as the could be - in the end this is what i deduced (and confirmed reading online) and is the #1 cause for people having slow raid, or overall poop performance - over saturating the PCI bus, by not realising they all share the same bandwidth pool.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

So...I'm trying to wrap my head around this. IDE = PCI = BAD? SATA = PCI-E = Good? That is what I am getting, unless I am being think, which often happens.


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## Mussels (Jan 26, 2008)

pretty much.

Think of it like this: anything on a PCI slot, has to wait for other things on PCI slots.

Things on PCI-Express, dont have to wait, and alls well for each individual device.

With onboard devices (sata, for this example) they can be on either (99% PCI-E for sata-II)

HOWEVER. if you get an add in card! choose PCI-E. otherwise you run out of bandwidth just like the old systems did before PCI-E, and everything chokes up ( a common thing back in the day on Nforce 2/3, was crackling audio on excessive hard drive use, because they all fought for resources(


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 26, 2008)

So, I need a RAID controller card to go into a PCI-E slot?


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## jpierce55 (Jan 26, 2008)

wow, this has become an educational thread quickly.


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## candle_86 (Jan 26, 2008)

Mussels said:


> lol, you're missing context.
> 
> SATA is good. IDE is good. its whats feeding them.
> 
> ...



thats not entirely true the Nforce chipsets since socketA had them on the hyperltransfer link, and still do for IDE, VIA did this starting with K8T800, not sure about Intel chipsets mind you, but IDE on just about all AMD chipsets are part of the HT Link these days along with the ethernet and SATA. I belive onboard audio is the last thing still intergrated fed from the PCI bus


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## panchoman (Jan 26, 2008)

the location of the drives really depends on the board.. for example.. lets use the block diagram of the gigabyte p35-dq6 board 







note that the south bridge chipset, the ich9r, controls 6 sata ports and is linked to the "codec" which is a sound controller/chip onboard, which will control the sound, the ich9r allows raid, but gigabyte decided to go ahead and implement their own controller onto the board, the gigabyte sata2 controller chip. this chip controlls the 2 raid capable sata ports as well as the ide port on the board. note that the ide is not even controlled by the chipset and has to be implemented as an extra feature by gigabyte.. sata is the future! ide will be dead very soon!! the gigabyte controller, is on the pci express bus.. so it runs as if you used a external controller such as http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115027 only that gigabyte built it into the bios so its still a software based raid. so its very difficult to make conclusions as its up to the board manufactures a lot as to where they want to place the controllers or if they want to use the southbridge etc.. so yeah.. its always best to check the block diagram for the board.


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## Franklinwallbrown (Jan 27, 2008)

So...some boards are good for RAID & some aren't? & you have to check the block digram? where do you get these block diagrams & what do you look for?


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## Mussels (Jan 27, 2008)

Franklinwallbrown said:


> So...some boards are good for RAID & some aren't? & you have to check the block digram? where do you get these block diagrams & what do you look for?



you're analysing a little too far into it. Yes indeed, some boards are better for raid than other. Server boards would be best, as mobo companies dont really expect home users to run tons of hard drives in RAID.

Serious RAID users will buy PCI-E x16 cards, or use a server with PCI-X.
My information was a simpler version, but yes various motherboards have workarounds to fix these issues. If you want to run a serious RAID setup, you will need to find a motherboard with the most bandwidth available to the SATA ports (directly connected to northbridge/PCI-E bus).

My statement about Nforce2/3 was still correct, hypertransport or not they got saturated and the most commonly noticed aspect of this was crackling audio on heavy northbridge usage. I owned several boards from DFI, abit and asus in NF2/3, and every last one of them suffered from this problem.


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## keakar (Jan 27, 2008)

Franklinwallbrown said:


> So, don't do RAID on SATA?



well think about it, sata is only 150 speed where IDE was 133 speed so its a tiny difference and no big speed increase but sata 2 at 300 speed will give you a big jump in speed for data transfer


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## Mussels (Jan 27, 2008)

keakar said:


> well think about it, sata is only 150 speed where IDE was 133 speed so its a tiny difference and no big speed increase but sata 2 at 300 speed will give you a big jump in speed for data transfer



its not the point, as even the fastest hard drives (samsung 1TB) can only push 100-120MB/s.
The *latest* sata-II drives are just borderline on maxing out IDE's 133MB/s bandwidth.

As said - its saturating the bus those ports are connected to, that is the problem.


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## Steevo (Jan 27, 2008)

If you want performance go buy a 300Gb SAS 15K drive. Newegg has them for $259.00


And you will also need a add in SAS card, you can find server class that offloads the RAID calculations and have quite large buffers but are very expensive, or a cheap version that uses the driver/CPU to perform raid calculations.


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## Mussels (Jan 27, 2008)

of course, thats server equipment. Just making the distinction.

"firmware" RAID solutions are the most common found in home user hardware, and as Steevo said use the CPU/system resources to do the work. This is why i personally dont use RAID, as when i last used it the CPU usage negated the increased drive speed (for gaming).

I dont have much firsthand knowledge on the server side of RAID, anyone who wants to give a brief rundown is more than welcome.


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## Steevo (Jan 27, 2008)

One of those drives will outperform every SATA drive on the market. RAID isn't needed with one of these drives for a home user unless you are into some hardcore video/audio editing and need the extra disk speed.


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## keakar (Jan 27, 2008)

first you say its the bus speed limiting what a drive can do speed wise so assuming you are correct, the same bus is used by the raid array when interfacing with the board for data retreival. so if your saying the drive doesnt matter because the motherboards bus bottlenecks it, this means you can plug a 2000mph engine on the hard drive and your still not going to get any more speed through the bottleneck. 

now either your wrong about the bus speed limiting it or a faster drive of 10k or 15k raptor cannot be faster than the simple sata you claim cant run at full speed because of this bus limitation. please clarify what your saying because it sounds contradictory

both my motherboard and my hard drive specifically state: 3 Gb/s (gigabits per second) SATA transfer rates (this is actual speeds they can achieve) and my old motherboard and hard drive both listed the actual transfer speeds at 133Mb/s (megabits per second) IDE ATA133


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## Steevo (Jan 27, 2008)

No harddrive will sustain a read or write beyond current interface technology. Each drive has it's own independent bus when you are dealing with SAS or SATA, therefore you will never saturate the bus or connection to the board with a current harddrive. 



The only time you will be able to saturate a bus or interface is when you have a RAID array on either a PCI based card or a chipset that uses the PCI interface natively. 


So lets break it down further. For example, a perpendicular recording 320GB drive will sustain uncached sequential reads in the area of 50-80MBps and the interface it is attached to allows for up to 300MBps, but this is only good for burst to and from the onboard data cache. 


If you were to put two of these in RAID 0 for our purposes we will say the volume of two drives can sustain a uncached read of 90-150MBps still not reaching the limit of EITHER drives interface limit of 300MBps. The bandwidth will only be capped when the saturation of a bus occurs, and that is not possible with current drive technology. 


However if you use a PCI RAID card, and the drives are capable of reading above the 133MBps TOTAL limit placed on the aggregate bus of PCI interfaces you will experience a performance hit. 


So again, if you want the fastest performance for the dollar currently, buy one of the new Hitachi 15K RPM SAS drives and a cheap PCI-e interface card.


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## Graogrim (Jan 27, 2008)

It's not contradictory, it's two separate areas.

Drive<-->Drive controller<--->Rest of the system

The link between the drive and the drive controller is dedicated, and is indeed much faster than the drive itself. The link between the drive controller and the rest of the system--in the case of older systems--may be shared with other devices whose performance can be impacted by heavy disk access. See the difference?

There is one aspect of SATA operation that I haven't seen mentioned, and that's native command queuing. This is a feature that enables the drive to intelligently reorder data requests to fulfill them in such a manner as to optimize seeking. The benefit is most obvious when the drive is servicing many requests.


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## Steevo (Jan 27, 2008)

IDE uses a different scheme, it shares two drives on one cable and controller port, and each drive must wait for its turn. So if drive A is reading drive B cannot be written to at the same time. The request can be issued, but it must wait on the current drive to finish before starting to fill the request. 



So in a RAID situation where you have both drives on one cable you will see a substantial performance hit from what the same array would be able to provide in a SATA configuration.


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## keakar (Jan 27, 2008)

so its thr raid controller that gives you the extra speeds not the actual raid array?

so using a a PCI RAID card you can use just one single drive and get better transfer rates than you would just plugging that drive into a sata 3.0 motherboard interface? and because it can go faster you realise the advantage of the faster drive rpm speeds with faster seek times?


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## keakar (Jan 27, 2008)

Steevo said:


> IDE uses a different scheme, it shares two drives on one cable and controller port, and each drive must wait for its turn. So if drive A is reading drive B cannot be written to at the same time. The request can be issued, but it must wait on the current drive to finish before starting to fill the request.
> 
> 
> 
> So in a RAID situation where you have both drives on one cable you will see a substantial performance hit from what the same array would be able to provide in a SATA configuration.



hold on a minute there steevo your getting into multiple drives and raid arrays, we were talking about a single hard drive and weather sata was faster than IDE

original post:


jpierce55 said:


> How much performance increase is there? I see SATA drives keep getting cheaper and here I am with an old ata 133. Is it worth the upgrade? Should I just wait until the old drive dies?
> 
> I have built pc's with SATA drives, but not systems that are very fast, and not with mobo's that support the 3gb speed, so I don't have a good comparison.
> 
> ...



then this got us distracted somewhat: 



Threeflow said:


> You won't see a huge difference in transfer speeds between your ATA133 drive and a new SATA drive.
> 
> Although on paper, the difference going from 133 to 300 would make a difference, in reality it is the drives themselves that are physically limited by how fast they spin, rather than the bandwidth available for them to transfer data to the motherboard.
> Think of it like this:
> ...


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## Steevo (Jan 27, 2008)

SATA will show a marginal increase due to faster cached reads and writes and advanced feature set.


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## hat (Jan 27, 2008)

My 250gb SATA 3Gb/s drive got 250MB/s in HDTach. This 120GB IDE drive got something like 125MB/s... pretty close to the 133MB/s max of the IDE bus.


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## Graogrim (Jan 27, 2008)

keakar said:


> so its thr raid controller that gives you the extra speeds not the actual raid array?
> 
> so using a a PCI RAID card you can use just one single drive and get better transfer rates than you would just plugging that drive into a sata 3.0 motherboard interface? and because it can go faster you realise the advantage of the faster speeds with faster seek times?


Not exactly. A RAID controller handles the organization of the data as it is scattered across multiple drives. Setting aside the redundancy features for a moment, the key to RAID's superior performance is that each drive in the array stores or retrieves only part of the information for any given data request. A shared burden means less work for each drive, and faster performance overall. Think of it as SLI for hard drives.

So attaching a single hard drive to a raid adapter is unlikely to improve your performance. It could potentially worsen performance because of extra overhead and the introduction of the PCI bus into the equation.


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## keakar (Jan 27, 2008)

Franklinwallbrown said:


> So... where do you get these block diagrams & what do you look for?



go to the board makers website and they should have it but not all brands have good support so you may never find one if its a lesser quality brand


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## Graogrim (Jan 27, 2008)

hat said:


> My 250gb SATA 3Gb/s drive got 250MB/s in HDTach. This 120GB IDE drive got something like 125MB/s... pretty close to the 133MB/s max of the IDE bus.


That would be its buffered transfer rate--what can be transferred between the drive's onboard cache and the host controller. That's not realistically representative of sustained performance, which requires physical disk access.


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## Mussels (Jan 27, 2008)

keakar said:


> first you say its the bus speed limiting what a drive can do speed wise so assuming you are correct, the same bus is used by the raid array when interfacing with the board for data retreival. so if your saying the drive doesnt matter because the motherboards bus bottlenecks it, this means you can plug a 2000mph engine on the hard drive and your still not going to get any more speed through the bottleneck.
> 
> now either your wrong about the bus speed limiting it or a faster drive of 10k or 15k raptor cannot be faster than the simple sata you claim cant run at full speed because of this bus limitation. please clarify what your saying because it sounds contradictory
> 
> both my motherboard and my hard drive specifically state: 3 Gb/s (gigabits per second) SATA transfer rates (this is actual speeds they can achieve) and my old motherboard and hard drive both listed the actual transfer speeds at 133Mb/s (megabits per second) IDE ATA133



You're getting the right info, wrong assumptions. I'm talking about RAID more than anything.

A single drive, as stated cant max out an IDE channel - we're just reaching those speed levels now on SATA-II.

MULTIPLE drives, combined, can saturate the PCI bus with ease, and once you get 4 or more you can saturate a PCI-E express bus depending on the layout of the board.

Your drive and SATA interface cannot do 3gigabits. its misleading advertising, the true BUS speed is 300MB/s. just because the bus goes that high, does NOT mean your hard drives do.


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## Mussels (Jan 27, 2008)

keakar said:


> so its thr raid controller that gives you the extra speeds not the actual raid array?
> 
> so using a a PCI RAID card you can use just one single drive and get better transfer rates than you would just plugging that drive into a sata 3.0 motherboard interface? and because it can go faster you realise the advantage of the faster drive rpm speeds with faster seek times?



Seek times dont change, thats the motor/mechanical aspects of the drive. Its only bandwidth that is concerned here.
if you had  PCI-E card, and the onboard used PCI then it would be faster. 

PCI = all devices share the same bandwidth.

PCI-E independant. Many devices are fun, bus is fairly hard to saturate with todays hardware. (PCI-E 1x is 250MB/s compared to PCI's shared pool of 133MB/s.)




hat said:


> My 250gb SATA 3Gb/s drive got 250MB/s in HDTach. This 120GB IDE drive got something like 125MB/s... pretty close to the 133MB/s max of the IDE bus.



Wrong. You are seeing BURST speeds. These are from the cache (8MB/16MB) unless you dont use more than 16MB of your hard drive, those speeds are irrelevant for normal use. Check the sequential read speeds.


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## zCexVe (Jan 27, 2008)

Wow,Thank you all verymuch.It had loads of education.Once again I thank you all.Please keep it going on.


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## Hitsugaya_Toushirou (Jan 27, 2008)

I don't want to ruin all this RAID performance increasing talk but for people who don't know much about RAID, i think you should note these things:

RAID stands for "Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks" so every official RAID level between 1-6 will reduce your disk capacity as the name suggests (Redundant, Inexpensive). RAID0 and JBOD are the only official RAID level, which doesn't reduce disk capacity.

All RAID levels require more than 1 HHD (unless you use software based RAID to create a RAID system from partitions, which is useless unless your using software based RAID1 for backup reasons). RAID levels 0 and 1 require a minimum of 2 HHD. RAID levels 3 to 5 require a minimum of 3 HHD. RAID 6 requires a minimum  of 4 HHD. Note that i didn't mention RAID2 since it currently isn't used in any form. If you use nested RAID levels, 2 or more digit levels (eg. 1+0 aka 10), then all it means is that it uses multiple RAIDs of the first digit with a RAID level of the second digit on top of the array so you'll require the multiplication of the minimums so RAID 10 will require 2x2=4 lots of HHD.

Also note that RAID will not dramatically increase HHD performance. Theoretically it should be near double the I/O rate but in real-life applications you only get a benefit of about % performance increase in extreme cases (You will get up to 30% increase in pure HHD I/O benchmarks), which is not worth the decrease in reliability.
"Reliability of a given RAID 0 set is equal to the average reliability of each disk divided by the number of disks in the set" so for every HHD you have in a RAID0 configurations you multiply the chance of an unrecoverable failure; meaning you'll be spending a lot of money replacing your HHD just for a negligible performance increase.

Unless your a company who wants to keep their data safe from corruption with RAID51 or 61, you have a lot of money and you want to get higher benchmarks but negligible real application performance increase with RAID0 or you want real-time backup with RAID1 (not recommended since this will dramatically reduce the reliability if you use 2 HHD from the same manufacturer... It is better to only backup whenever necessary)

If you still want use RAID and get a delusional performance increase just to make yourself feel good with higher synthetic benchmarks then I recommend that each of your HHD are from different manufacturers and use different models to increase the reliability. Also it is important that each of your HHD are of same capacity otherwise you may end up wasting lots of capacity since the capacity remaining in a RAID, Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks, configuration depends on the smallest capacity HHD.

I nearly forgot to mention JBOD, think of it as reverse partitioning since it takes multiple physical drives and puts them together into 1 logical drive. This is completely unnecessary unless you have a bunch of low capacity HHD (eg. 4 lots of 10GiB HHD to form a 40GiB logical drive) otherwise you might notice a performance decrease if you use high capacity drives.

The best alternative to get high performance with high capacity is to get Western Digital's Raptor 150GiB for your applications and page-files while you can have a cheap power saving Western Digital Cavier GP 500GiB/750GiB/1TiB for all your storage like movies/images/documents since you don't need fast speeds to just load up a movie off the HHD or open an image. This will give you the performance where you need it (real performance compared to RAID) and off the ones which don't need it. Also this doesn't reduce reliability of the HHDs so you won't need to be replacing so many drives.

I still have more to say but i think this is enough for now. Also, sorry if i mentioned some information already said since i kind of didn't read page 2 much.

Edit: I got some information from Mussels that Samsung's 1TiB HHD has higher pure throughput than Western Digital's Raptor but I can't say that it'll translate to better performance in real life applications, it most likely will though. We'll need to find a true real-life benchmark comparison of these 2 HHD for proof.


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## Hitsugaya_Toushirou (Jan 27, 2008)

I thought i might as well answer the thread title as well:
As posts before mine mention there wouldn't be any noticeable performance difference between the different storage buses since the HHD don't use all the bandwidth so any will do fine.

Just to note some bandwidth differences:
UDMA 133 (aka ATA133) -       1064Mbits
SATA 150 (aka SATA I) -        1200Mbits
SATA 300 (aka SATA II) -       2400Mbits
SAS (Serial attached SCSI)-    3000Mbits
SATA 600 (aka SATA III) -      4800Mbits
SAS 2 -                               6000Mbits

Also, i read page 2.
Mussel, you mentioned that Samsung's 1TiB is the fastest HHD so is it even faster than Western Digital's Raptor?


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## regan1985 (Jan 27, 2008)

when i went from ide to sata i didnt notice the difference , the only time i did is when i went from a 5200rpm drive to a 7200 there difference isnt so big!

the main reason to go sata is your ide has more of a chance of dieing soon as its old,sata cables look better in your case,you can raid your drives that when you get better performance and also mobo of the future wont have ide cable


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## Frick (Jan 27, 2008)

regan1985 said:


> the main reason to go sata is your ide has more of a chance of dieing soon as its old,sata cables look better in your case,you can raid your drives that when you get better performance and also mobo of the future wont have ide cable



Plus many motherboards nowadays only have 1 PATA-slot..

But go SATA. It feels good to throw away those cables.


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## regan1985 (Jan 27, 2008)

it does feel good to put then under my bed in this case as i have to get them out from time to time to replace my dieing sata drives


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## Mussels (Jan 27, 2008)

Hitsugaya_Toushirou said:


> Also, i read page 2.
> Mussel, you mentioned that Samsung's 1TiB is the fastest HHD so is it even faster than Western Digital's Raptor?



i was linked to it here on TPU, probably earlier in this thread, or one about hard drives. It reached around 110MB/s sustained, compared to a raptors 70-80MB/s.

For sheer throughput, its incredible.

I have thanked a few people in this thread now for their posts - lots of good info is cropping up here.




Frick said:


> Plus many motherboards nowadays only have 1 PATA-slot..
> 
> But go SATA. It feels good to throw away those cables.



My asus boards technically have none - its a Jmicron SATA-II port with an IDE adaptor built on top. Technically its still SATA, and connected to the PCI-E bus. Figure that out for weird.


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## Hitsugaya_Toushirou (Jan 27, 2008)

Mussels said:


> i was linked to it here on TPU, probably earlier in this thread, or one about hard drives. It reached around 110MB/s sustained, compared to a raptors 70-80MB/s.
> 
> For sheer throughput, its incredible.
> 
> ...



Thanks for the thanks on my posts and info on Samsung's 1TiB HHD.
I just wanted to make sure people weren't delusional about RAID (mainly level 0) since the performance increase is too little and not worth the reduction in reliability. RAID is more or less a business thing who want to use RAID51 or 61 to keep their data very secure and safe from corruption and don't worry about capacity redundancies.

EDIT: I just wanted to make sure i have my eyes on the correct drive. Is this the 1TiB Samsung, which you mentioned? It's the only one i can find so i assume that I'm correct.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/productmodel.do?group=72&type=61&subtype=63&model_cd=249

EDIT2: Don't worry, it looks like thats the one.

EDIT3: I looked at some reviews on this product and it appears that there is a problem with it... and i looked on newegg as well and lots of people are voting it 1/5... An explanation?


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## Mussels (Jan 27, 2008)

Hitsugaya_Toushirou said:


> Thanks for the thanks on my posts and info on Samsung's 1TiB HHD.
> I just wanted to make sure people weren't delusional about RAID (mainly level 0) since the performance increase is too little and not worth the reduction in reliability. RAID is more or less a business thing who want to use RAID51 or 61 to keep their data very secure and safe from corruption and don't worry about capacity redundancies.
> 
> EDIT: I just wanted to make sure i have my eyes on the correct drive. Is this the 1TiB Samsung, which you mentioned? It's the only one i can find so i assume that I'm correct.
> ...


i dont know anything about the problems. I was linked to a tomshardware review by a forum member here less than 48 hours ago, and have no personal experience with the drive.


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## Hitsugaya_Toushirou (Jan 27, 2008)

After reading some reviews i guess my initial method i mentioned before appears to be good. The Raptor does well with loading up the windows kernel and usage of Page-files appears to be good as well. The Samsung will be good if you want to save some money and you want 1TiB of fast HHD rather than 150GiB of fast HHD with slower 1TiB.

The only thing stopping this Samsung HHD from being very good is because of the ECC Errors mentioned by consumers on newegg.
I was considering getting a new HHD sometime maybe so if i find that it's safe to get this HHD then i might get it... i should be able to get this for $300AUD locally (<$265USD) with no problem.


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## Steevo (Jan 27, 2008)

The 300GB Hitachi SAS drive is still faster than either, and offers twice the storage of the Raptor.


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## Hitsugaya_Toushirou (Jan 27, 2008)

Yeah i noticed the 300GB Hitachi (SAS bus)

But the price is a bit high so the question is, would it be worth the extra cost...

Also, i don't think many people use over 150GB for the OS, Page-files and applications since most of what takes up our storage will be movies i guess.

Also SAS won't be found on an average Motherboard, it's more a server thing.


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## imperialreign (Jan 27, 2008)

A site with pros/cons listed of each type of RAID setup: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_10.html

TBH, though, I've never had any good experience with Hitachi drives . . . maybe it's just been bad luck with the 7 of them I've owned over the last 15 years.

My personal preference is Seagate drives - only reason I'm currently using WD drives was due to wallet restraints last time around.



Although - I can say that coming from a UATA-133/UDMA-6 7200 RPM IDE connection on a capable motherboard to a SATA-300 7200 RPM HDD, there was an noticeable improvement in OS bootup, program bootup, HDD access, defrag times - everything across the board was noticeably faster.

But, like what has been pointed out - the PCIE BUS moves a lot more information than the PCI BUS.


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## keakar (Jan 27, 2008)

ok, we are all learning a lot here and thanks to all for sharing all this good info but i wish to make sure we answer the original poster.

he is looking to upgrade his computer and has IDE now but was thinking about upgrading to sata 3 hard drive but wanted to know how much faster it would be compared to his IDE. SATA 3 vs IDE = what kind of speed increase is there.

i think it would also need a new motherboard to see any performance increase wouldnt it?

in case i missunderstood the OP i'll post it for you:




jpierce55 said:


> How much performance increase is there? I see SATA drives keep getting cheaper and here I am with an old ata 133. Is it worth the upgrade? Should I just wait until the old drive dies?
> 
> I have built pc's with SATA drives, but not systems that are very fast, and not with mobo's that support the 3gb speed, so I don't have a good comparison.
> 
> ...


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## jpierce55 (Jan 27, 2008)

I think I will stick with my drive until it dies keakar, or becomes to small....with what has been said in this topic. I am glad I made the op this is an educational thread.

In anycase keaker I am cool on the motherboard side, I have two sata 2 mobo's (what I meant vs. sata 3 as I posted).


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## Mussels (Jan 28, 2008)

jpierce55 said:


> I think I will stick with my drive until it dies keakar, or becomes to small....with what has been said in this topic. I am glad I made the op this is an educational thread.
> 
> In anycase keaker I am cool on the motherboard side, I have two sata 2 mobo's (what I meant vs. sata 3 as I posted).



i beleive at the start of the threadi  said this to the OP before it went off topic a bit: its not the interface, so much as the drive. Two brands of 250GB sata-II can have a massive difference, its more what drive he gets rather than the interface.


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