SATA-II explained

locutus12 · 17 Mar 2006 at 17:28

its a DM10 i believe and the drives use is a main drive, used for strage and file transfere, on avg i shift 20 to 40gb a day around.

smids · 17 Mar 2006 at 17:58

locutus12 said:
its a DM10 i believe and the drives use is a main drive, used for strage and file transfere, on avg i shift 20 to 40gb a day around.

Hmm, those DM10's have had bad problems on nF4 boards and reliability is an issue. Go for it if a good price but keep regular backups

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locutus12 · 17 Mar 2006 at 19:35

its not that great a price to be honest... £65 second hand, and i have never trusted maxtor drives as in ten years the only drives ive owned or worked with that have failed have ALWAYS been blooming maxtors

also my board uses the ULI chipset which are manufactured by Nvidia these days. plus maxtors seem to dislike being put in systems with seagates at times... (is this just me or have others found this??? )

so basically even if i went to all the trouble to raid the 2 120`s i wouldnt gain anything?

just to throw in another option, i could get a western digital SATA2 200GB 8mb cache for £51 but as ive never used them i dont know about reliabillity or pricing...

NickK · 25 Mar 2006 at 22:11

Btw a mate has found that the geometry between the Maxtor 300GB DM10 SATA 1 and SATA 2 versions is different. The result is a different drive size. Only by a small amount but it ment that he couldn't use the SATA2 in a RAID5 array of the SATA1 previous version of the same drive.

Monstermunch · 5 Apr 2006 at 00:00

Smids...

Referring back to my earlier question about raid0 with 4 drives etc.

I was just thinking that I might go for 2 x deskstars in raid0 and just have 1 large volume for storage. I know I won't be able to mirror but I transfer my important stuff regularly now anyway cos I tend to be one of those people who re-formats every 2 months.

Am I right in thinking this still takes advantage of the speed, but just not the reliability of adding raid1 for mirroring.

smids · 5 Apr 2006 at 01:48

Yeah, you are right. You'll get all the speed (actually faster due to RAID1 killing writes). You can still RAID1 the storage drive though separately

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Tommy B · 14 Apr 2006 at 01:06

I still don't see what the benefit is?

My new WD Caviar 16MB Cache HD is running in Sata 2 mode. And what is the difference between LBA anc CHS, which is better?

smids · 14 Apr 2006 at 01:15

Tommy B said:
I still don't see what the benefit is?

My new WD Caviar 16MB Cache HD is running in Sata 2 mode. And what is the difference between LBA anc CHS, which is better?

There isn't much unless you run a RAID type array where you can saturate the bandwidth. I think SATA-II is unfairly labelled as the 300MB/s bandwidth only though, when in actual fact the SATA-II standard brings a lot of features with it (though whether they are implement by manufacturers is another matter).

LBA and CHS - not great on those, but I know I cannot boot with CHS on my board. I leave it on Auto and it all works fine.

Foehammer2003 · 26 Apr 2006 at 19:01

Hi, er... ok... tried to follow most of that but need some clarity

I'm just finishing buying the parts for a my first complete build (wish me luck lol), and i have chosen an Asrock 939Dual-Sata2 mobo, and have got to the HD selection. Now i was going to get a SATA2 drive, but now i just dont know. From what i've read in this thread i make it that if i were to buy two (seagate 160Gb 8Mb lets say) drives, both identical except one is SATA the other SATA2, then i would find no improvement in performance?

If not slightly frustrating, as part (a small part) of my mobo buying decision was that SATA2 was going to offer me more performance, but then that leads to my second question....

If there is a difference in performance, would i still be better of getting a drive with 16Mb buffer? or the SATA2? Im not at all interested in RAID array's or anything like that, as im trying to keep it simple for my first build

Hope someone can help!

smids · 26 Apr 2006 at 20:24

Hi, Welcome to the forums

,

Right, onto business - basically there will be no difference between the two. Bust will be higher on a 300MB/s enabled SATA2 drive but for drives like Seagates, seeing as all have had NCQ since the 7200.7, there is will be no difference between a SATA1 and SATA-II drive. SATA-II drives *might* have 1-2MB/s higher average read due to higher bursts which raise the average but that is about it. Still, I advise to get a SATA-II drive as they do have more features often.

I would agree with you, that a 16MB cache is probably more beneficial for a single drive user than an 8MB and would suggest this as your drive. I would have a look at the Seagate 7200.9 250GB 16MB cache drive - this seems like a good bet - SATA-II, 3.0gbp/s, NCQ (one of the best command queuing chips of all manufacturers), 16MB cache.

Also, on a cost per GB ratio, I believe 200GB upwards is the way to go now.

[HB]Rugrat · 28 Apr 2006 at 18:40

Can I mix a SATA-II drive with an older SATA drive to create a RAID 0 volume? My mobo-controller only supports the original standard and I've bought an updated SATA-II version of the drive that I already have (a 160gb Maxtor).

Also, would this destroy the contents of the original drive? Would Windows XP (being the evil pig-dog that it is) require reinstallation anyway?

TIA!

smids · 28 Apr 2006 at 19:03

[HB]Rugrat said:
Can I mix a SATA-II drive with an older SATA drive to create a RAID 0 volume? My mobo-controller only supports the original standard and I've bought an updated SATA-II version of the drive that I already have (a 160gb Maxtor).

Also, would this destroy the contents of the original drive? Would Windows XP (being the evil pig-dog that it is) require reinstallation anyway?

TIA!

You can so long as you limit force 150MB/s external if the SATA-II is a 300MB/s drive. Creating any RAID0 will destroy all data and require a reinstallation.

[HB]Rugrat · 28 Apr 2006 at 19:11

Bum, I was afraid of that... will it make much of a difference for gaming? (BF2 primarily).

Thanks for your advice smids

smids · 28 Apr 2006 at 19:34

[HB]Rugrat said:
Bum, I was afraid of that... will it make much of a difference for gaming? (BF2 primarily).

Thanks for your advice smids

Only in map loading. Yes it would be faster, but just for map loading - so the question is, is it worth it?

Also, despite them being 'able' to RAID0, I seriously advie the use of 2 identical disks. RAID0 is prone enough as it is with two identical drives to failure but with completely different generation drives, the chance of say data corruption etc is greater or possible other issues. The controller will see them as just 2 xxxGB capacity drives but there will be differences in times to read or write between them.

[HB]Rugrat · 28 Apr 2006 at 20:42

Thanks again Smids - under the circumstances I'll just use for storage of downloaded por... ware... shareware

Foehammer2003 · 29 Apr 2006 at 20:10

smids said:
Right, onto business - basically there will be no difference between the two. Bust will be higher on a 300MB/s enabled SATA2 drive but for drives like Seagates, seeing as all have had NCQ since the 7200.7, there is will be no difference between a SATA1 and SATA-II drive. SATA-II drives *might* have 1-2MB/s higher average read due to higher bursts which raise the average but that is about it. Still, I advise to get a SATA-II drive as they do have more features often.

I would agree with you, that a 16MB cache is probably more beneficial for a single drive user than an 8MB and would suggest this as your drive. I would have a look at the Seagate 7200.9 250GB 16MB cache drive - this seems like a good bet - SATA-II, 3.0gbp/s, NCQ (one of the best command queuing chips of all manufacturers), 16MB cache.

Thanks smids!!! top quality info there! Then thats the one i shall get, just found it, not a bad price either! Just one other thing, other than a hard drive im good to go, is it possible to turn the PC on without a harddrive installed, just to check everything is working? and to take a peek at the bios?

Obviously i dont want to damage anything! lol

smids · 29 Apr 2006 at 20:18

Foehammer2003 said:
Thanks smids!!! top quality info there! Then thats the one i shall get. Just one other thing, other than a hard drive im good to go, is it possible to turn the PC on without a harddrive installed, just to check everything is working? and to take a peek at the bios?

Obviously i dont want to damage anything! lol

Yes, you can turn you PC on without a HD and go into BIOS

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Foehammer2003 · 29 Apr 2006 at 20:43

thanks top support! Oh i took it out lol, but was reffering to overclockers (this site anyway) just an abbreviation, lol looking back it didnt look good though!

Thanks again!

amdhappy · 6 May 2006 at 09:53

Thanks for the sticky, that has cleared up many questions I wanted to ask!

smids · 6 May 2006 at 10:28

amdhappy said:
Thanks for the sticky, that has cleared up many questions I wanted to ask!

Heh, no problems - if you have any questions not covered, please ask in here and if in general interest, will be added to the sticky

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