SATA vs. SATAII

Slime101 · 20 Dec 2006 at 17:00

My HDD's are Sata drives, 80Gb Boot/progs and a 200Gb Data drive (both 8mb cache) - as i'm upgrading from my celeron system to a C2D system would i actually notice a difference if i was to swap over to SATAII drives?

PinkFloyd · 20 Dec 2006 at 17:06

Slime101 said:
My HDD's are Sata drives, 80Gb Boot/progs and a 200Gb Data drive (both 8mb cache) - as i'm upgrading from my celeron system to a C2D system would i actually notice a difference if i was to swap over to SATAII drives?

Not sure how noticable, but the Transfer rate should in theory be double.
To put it into perspective, my Sata2 Seagate 7200.10 puts my Sata1 drives to shame. Even a raid-0 array doesn't touch the sata2

Slime101 · 20 Dec 2006 at 17:08

So double would be really noticable then...hmm

Dave2150 · 20 Dec 2006 at 17:09

No difference between sata 1 or 2 at the moment.

No residential use Harddrive can exceed 150mb/sec transfer rate.

PinkFloyd · 20 Dec 2006 at 17:09

I'm basing it should be notible on a bit of logic.
Benchmarking shows my Sata2 to be much quicker than my raid-0 array.

And I noticed a huge diffference in performance from going single sata1 drive -> raid-0 sata1. It should be an increase the same as that.

snowdog · 20 Dec 2006 at 17:15

PinkFloyd said:
I'm basing it should be notible on a bit of logic.
Benchmarking shows my Sata2 to be much quicker than my raid-0 array.

And I noticed a huge diffference in performance from going single sata1 drive -> raid-0 sata1. It should be an increase the same as that.

Thats because its a 7200.10, a 7200.10 ide is just as fast, only thing that is faster is burst, wich isnt really noticable in anything...

Dr_Evil · 20 Dec 2006 at 17:17

RAID0 - faster access times for read/write.

SATAII - faster data transfer speed capabilities.

Even though my Raptor 74Gb is SATA1, i doubt a SATAII drive can beat it's performance.

(not to mention 2 in RAID0)...

beast · 20 Dec 2006 at 18:33

No difference really. I've had to set my HDD to sata 1 for my first motherboard, but changed it to SATA2 as my new one supports it. But no difference in performance whatsoever.

Slime101 · 20 Dec 2006 at 18:58

I shant bother rushing out to replace them then

Thanks for the input chaps.

Jay_t · 21 Dec 2006 at 16:46

To use an analogy, its like asking if you could travel faster on a quiet motorway if there were 6 lanes instead of 3.

Dr_Evil · 21 Dec 2006 at 17:08

Jay_t said:
To use an analogy, its like asking if you could travel faster on a quiet motorway if there were 6 lanes instead of 3.

What about on a busy motorway then? Surely it must make some difference in some situation, no?

jaykay · 21 Dec 2006 at 17:28

but no drive can use the whole 300mb that sata2 gives each drive has its onw cable

Dr_Evil · 21 Dec 2006 at 17:41

jaykay said:
but no drive can use the whole 300mb that sata2 gives each drive has its onw cable

then what's the point of having SATAII at all?

rpstewart · 21 Dec 2006 at 18:01

Having ever increasing possible transfer rates is not as important for point to point protocols like SATA than it is for bus based ones like SCSI but it still has its uses. While HDD technology is improving and has far outstripped previous standards (ATA-33, SCSI-2 etc) there is a sense of diminishing returns so interface standards are once again ahead of the storage devices. However solid state devices are coming, perhaps not for bulk storage yet but for high speed boot devices in the same way as Raptors are used today. These devices will stretch the capabilities of current interfaces and so having standards which have a degree of futureproofing in them will allow solid state devices to show a benefit over traditional mechanical disks. Hopefully this will encourage early take up and drive down prices.

Dr_Evil · 22 Dec 2006 at 10:42

So what does this exactly say about my 160Gb SATAII drive at work?

MoD_Callidus · 22 Dec 2006 at 10:47

Dr_Evil said:
then what's the point of having SATAII at all?

so we all go out and replace mobo's hdd's etc that really don't need it and the hardware companies make a tidy profit again next year. same applies to gfx cpu's and on and on and on

rpstewart · 22 Dec 2006 at 10:51

Dr_Evil said:
So what does this exactly say about my 160Gb SATAII drive at work?

Basically it says it's fine. The burst speed is > 150Mb/s so it's running in SATAII mode. The sustained transfer rate is fine, the tail off towards the centre of the disk is normal, there are no wild spikes in the trace which could suggest disk problems.

ByteJuggler · 22 Dec 2006 at 12:11

Dr_Evil said:
then what's the point of having SATAII at all?

So your peak transfer rate on a single channel is higher. But this will only really be used during bursting from cache, or if you have a RAID array or multiple drives *on a single channel* (this is possible with a SATA port multiplier, that would allow you to connect multiple sata drives to a single sata port, but they're not really practically in use at the moment. See http://www.sata-io.org/portmultiplier.asp)

BTW, "SATA II" is not equivalent to "support for 300Mbyte/Sec". SATAII defines a set of features over the core SATA I feature set. A drive that supports any SATAII feature (of which 300Mb/sec data rate is but one, NCQ being another IIRC) can therefore be said to be SATA II compliant, but you should check exactly which of the extra features defined by SATA II is supported by every "SATA II" labelled drive you look at. See the sticky at the top and the SATA-IO organisations clarifications.