SATA3 and USB3 - Should we care?

jaybee

jaybee

jaybee

Soldato
Joined
10 Jul 2008
Posts
8,284
I notice that the new P55 motherboards are not coming out with USB3 or SATA3 due to delays in getting SATA3 working. Motherboards should start shipping with this functionality supposedly early 2010. But...is there a reason to wait for either of these technologies? USB3 probably not, but with regard to SATA3 with 6gbps bandwidth (600MB/s I believe?) will this not be required if people are going to be running SSDs in RAID 0 arrays when they get cheaper? Some single SSDs are up in the 200MB/s range are they not?
 
There will always be add in sata 3 cards available when the technology matures, so I wouldn't say it's definitely worth holding back on a purchase for. SSDs are going to steadily get faster IMO, so I do think sata 3 will become a must have feature, but like I said, add in cards will be available.

I'm not really sure about USB3 though, useful if you are copying Gigs of film back and forwards between your PC and a suitable enabled mobile device, but a lot of people like wireless technologies for the convenience vs the performance of wired.
 
USB3 appeals a bit as it means moving data onto flash quicker.

Sata 3 (or 6 if you like) not at all since I just don't believe 400mb/s to be a bottleneck anyway
 
HazardO said:
There will always be add in sata 3 cards available when the technology matures, so I wouldn't say it's definitely worth holding back on a purchase for. SSDs are going to steadily get faster IMO, so I do think sata 3 will become a must have feature, but like I said, add in cards will be available.

I'm not really sure about USB3 though, useful if you are copying Gigs of film back and forwards between your PC and a suitable enabled mobile device, but a lot of people like wireless technologies for the convenience vs the performance of wired.
Click to expand...

Of course, I didn't think of that. I guess then the bottleneck would be the PCI express slot that the SATA 3 card was sat in, which would mean having to use atleast an 8x slot maybe?
 
jaybee said:
Of course, I didn't think of that. I guess then the bottleneck would be the PCI express slot that the SATA 3 card was sat in, which would mean having to use atleast an 8x slot maybe?
Click to expand...

A 4 way PCIe2 slot would provide ~16Gbps (2GBps) of bandwidth each way, which would be enough for a 4 port sata3 card under most conditions (Well you would need 2.4GBps if you were actually going to max all 4 sata ports simultaneously.)
 
of course we should care

we're getting closer and closer to the SATA2 limit, and frankly USB2 (whilst a massive improvement on USB1) was outdated the day it came out
 
SATA 2 speed hasn't been maxed out by anything other than buffer emptying/filling from what I understand*.

The maximum data transfer rate from hard drives (physical platters) is still generally something under 150mb/s (SATA 1), so the only speed advantage SATA 3 would give would be for the time it takes a drives buffer to fill/empty and possibly if they improve secondary aspects (instruction cueing etc that were I believe implemented with SATA 2).

USB 3 is to my mind the more important tech in the short to mid term because it's still a big bottle neck for external devices.



*Try looking at sustained (rather than burst) data transfer rates on modern drives ;)
 
true, but we're more likely to get more ram-disk type products when there's more scope to play with. :)
 
not to mention that in 3 years, who knows what sort of sustained transfer speeds we'll be getting?
 
Sata3 - useful for file servers, NFS etc as we move onto 10gb networks etc but even then that would be extremely rare!

Home use barely makes use of ATA100.
 
Technician: Hello Joe, here's a very fast ramdisk
Joe: Where the hell has my data gone? This is your fault
Technician: Um... it's a ramdisk
 
Can't believe everyones forgetting about them, but SSDs are effectively bottlenecked by SATA2, there's no point designing them to go any faster. Current drives are about 250MB/s sustained, internally raiding them further means you would need to support 500MB/s.
 
Jokester said:
Can't believe everyones forgetting about them, but SSDs are effectively bottlenecked by SATA2, there's no point designing them to go any faster. Current drives are about 250MB/s sustained, internally raiding them further means you would need to support 500MB/s.
Click to expand...

Then again, a true Sata 3Gbps port, should be able to put out 384MB/s no?
 
Does this actually matter though? I'm not questioning whether the southbridge is the bottleneck, in raid 0 is certainly is. However is the 300MB/s limit slowing computers down, or by this point is the overall bottleneck elsewhere?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom