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SATA, is it worth it?


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This little chat I had made me wonder why SATA would be anything worth buying.

premier69 Have you personally tested sata?

Davis no

Davis It's tooooooooooooooo early for sata

Davis maybe in 2-4 years

premier69 Why?

premier69 Except for small improvements.

Davis It's being pushed onto the market before getting ready

Davis The specs for SATA were changed 3 times in the last 2 years

Davis + there is not 1 single SATA device on the market

Davis they are all ATA disks with converters

Davis so they offer no sata advantages

premier69 I saw one cd-burner with sata interface

Davis yeah

Davis and an ATA-SATA converter behind that

premier69 So no gain

Davis sure 2%

premier69 Why did they market sata so early then? Money?

Davis coz it would be the only device on the controller

Davis SATA support only 1 device per controller

premier69 I know

Davis wheras ATA supports 2Dev/Cont

premier69 Yup

Davis Why did they market sata so early then?

OF COURSE IT'S MONEY ;-)

premier69 I mean when it's so apparent it's no gain

Davis 99.99 % of the people don't understand s*** about computers, and would buy anything they are told is good

Davis same for the P4, GigabitLAN, WLAN, Centrino, ...

premier69 What about those?

Davis expensive, worthless, yet successful

Davis Oh. I forgot to mention bluetooth

premier69 What's Centrino

Davis Intel's mobile CPU with "magical" WLAN capabilities, which are nothing than an integrated WLAN chip in the chipset

premier69 What's wrong with bluetooth? Part from it being so **** slow.

Davis that's it!!! very very slow

premier69 Yeah a maximum data transfer speed of 768kbit was it?

Davis yes but practically 3-8 KB/s

premier69 Should be upto 96

Davis should be

Davis just as SATA should get up to 150MB/s

Davis :-)

-------------------------

so what do you guys think? what about sata?

And what other products are there that are just "repainted" old products marketing with hype?

essentialy warnings for less experienced pc users could be posted here.

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Doesn't Seagate makes native SATA drive that support command queuing?

That should boost performance a fair bit.

I would rather have4 serial ATA cables connected to 4 seperate drives than 2 huge, delicate, and generally more annoying ATA cables the connect 4 ATA drives...

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i personally own a maxtor sata drive and i must say that i'm very proud of it. i've tested it many times and it's a 15%/25% faster than an ATA133 drive. also that gives me an extra IDE slot. now imagine 2 SATA drives with RAID configuration :) i can't say anything bad about it perfomance or silent but... they're generally expensive. another thing that it's annoying it's that many OS does not have propper drivers so talking about windows i must load the driver during installation and for example knoppix (linux live cd) can read from the disk but not write to it. the solution it's time, but as a conclusion i recommend you my maxtor 6Y120M0 (120gb, 7200rpm, ≤ 9.3 ms average seek time, 8MB Cache Buffer, sata... read more)

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@premier: you should chat with smarter people

GigabitLAN, WLAN, Centrino worthless??? Bluetooth worthless???

I was going to write something about SATA, but its more fun to call products worthless because I can't afford them.

SCSI harddrive: worthless!

PCI Express: worthless!

Notebook: worthless!

Athlon 64 FX: worthless! * No wait I'm a fanboy.

Intel Itanium: worthless! * That's more like it.

Plasma television: worthless!

Italian sportscar: worthless!

Motorized yacht: worthless!

Berverly Hills mansion: worthless!

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I've been lurking around the forums for some time now. Seeing this thread made me want to register, which is a good thing :rolleyes: .

I manage a medium size IT shop for a research lab. Reading your conversation, I cant help but wonder when did this convo take place? Davis is wrong on several accounts:

1) Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu all have native SATA drives (although I dont think the general public can get the Maxline III's yet)

2) SATA is not more expensive. The drives are comparable in price (to PATA), however in the IT world, it is flat out blowing away SCSI. I just purchased an Triton 16Bay hot-swap Raid 5 SATA. It holds 6TB and it costs about $15k less than any comparable solution out there AND Im getting 220MB/s sustained transfer.

Granted this is an extreme comparison because a majority of the forum users are home users.

3) 1 device per controller??!! He must mean mobo designers are only including 1 or 2 SATA pinouts. Each controller can actually support 2,4,6,8,16 SATA devices (depending if its a CERC, adaptec, Promise, etc)

3) His statements about P4, gigabit lan, etc..its not even worth rebutting

Bottom line, every mobo made in the last 6 months (that isnt some value line ) comes standard with SATA and most of the times Serial Raid 0/1. Try comparing the performance between ANY PATA Raid 0 setup with Serial Raid 0. On one of my test box's I had a pair of Fujitsu PATA 120GB, 8MB cache, 7200rpm Raid 0 vs Maxtor Maxline Plus II SATA, 8MB cache, 7200rpm.

Sandra Sisoft: PATA = 68MB/s, SATA = 93MB/s

Just my 2.5 cents worth. :)

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Ty!

I do agree that many times a company is pushing new technology to make money, but I believe that is called innovation. Most people dont work long hours inventing new technology just for the sheer joy of it. :)

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hi there! great knowledge nice explanations. welcome ITman

is it fun to play with 6tb? :)

of course there are lots of worthless hardware and software. but most of them are the steps to better hardware.

bluetooth, well i think its a pretty usefull thing, instead of trying to use infra-red and trying to align the reciever and the transmitter, I think a wireless solution such as bluetooth is a new innovation. i'm sure we're going to have faster things soon.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ummm yea seagate has sata native harddrives. sata1 had not changed in the previous six months or so before its release. im running a 2.8c @ 3.15GHz and it whomps the crap outta my amd 2500+ barton @ 3200+. And fi you still wanna complain about sata, try raid0 on an overclocked southbridge, start up some GTA-VC and imagine goin from island to island and thinking its a video card issue and not really it loading the next island off the harddrive (maxtors .. not sata native, but dont tell their speeds that), so yea go for sata, and feel comfortable because sata 1 & 2 are supposed to be backwards compatible, and sata 2 & 3 are supposed to be backwards compatible also, make the upgrade process able to be spread out over a longer period of time and less of a hit to your wallet.

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Before SATA we had big wide cables stuffed in our cases that blocked airflow and were sometimes hard to route. Had to shut off the computer before adding or removing any drives, and were limited to two drives on a channel. Not to mention having to fidget with little microscopic jumpers and sometimes unintelligible charts detailing the settings.

Yeah, I'd say it's definately worth it. :D

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We have ordered our new Maxtors... should be in next week. We edit video...

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drives, integrated, single-chip native SATA solution, the new DiamondMax 10 drives feature native command queuing (NCQ), dual-processor technology, and a new 16MB buffer to deliver unparalleled speeds compared to traditional 7200 RPM drives. The drives self-balance system workloads for more efficient hard drive operations.

They are going into RAID 5 arrays and will kick a** as compared to SCSI crap...

We are using 3ware's Escalade 9500Ses. We have tested production samples of the Maxtor 350 GB drives in excess of 400 Mbytes per second (MB/sec) sustained RAID 5 reads and over 100 MB/sec RAID 5 sequential writes with less than 3% CPU utilization.

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  • 1 month later...
They are going into RAID 5 arrays and will kick a** as compared to SCSI crap...

Pardon me but SCSI 320 on a Adaptec 39320A-R with 20k drives is wayyyyyyyyyy faster if you configure it as raid 10 it's 4 time faster than a SATA Raid sorry but SCSI RULES.

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Although I still think that SATA1 drives are **** and not worth buying for current-generation PATA-enabled mobos, I do agree that SATA2 with NCQ on a PCIe-mobo is the next standard (2006?).

The SATA cost-to-benefit ratio has definitely improved in the last year, IMHO mainly due to enterprise application of SATA raid boxes (IT depts are slavering over the SATA-to-SCSI cost ratio as we speak).

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I have only played with a couple of SATA drives and controllers... But from what i have seen the speed currently is about the same as the equivent PATA drive.

I have 2 Maxtor 200Gb Drives, 1 SATA, 1 PATA and they are working as a mirrored RAID with no faults. There is a very slight adventage to SATA drive in the temperature aspect though. the 2 drives i have both are vertical infron of the front case fans, and the PATA drive runs much cooler.

For more information regarding SATA, visit:

Free Dictionary = SATA

Hope this helps you decide! :thumbup

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