On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 02:16:30 GMT,
wrote:

I'm considering purchasing a Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.7 7200RPM SATA II with NCQ Hard Drive
from newegg.com. This is model ST3160827AS.

BTW my processor is an Intel Pentium 4 at 2000 MHz
My machine does not support hyperthreading.

1st question:
Does a hard drive which supports NCQ as compared to one which does not support NCQ
serve any advantage when used with a machine which does not support hyperthreading?

Hyperthreading and NCQ are two unrelated technologies, one
has no bearing on the other. However, the motherboard has
to support NCQ too, if you have no indication that yours
does, it probably doesn't.



Other questions:
My motherboard does not have an interface for a Serial ATA hard drive.
AFAIK in order to use a SATA drive, I have two options:


Option A: Purchase a PCI controller card that I can connect the SATA drive to.
PCI is limited to 133 per sec right? Does this mean that this configuration
is no better using a IDE PATA 133 drive plugged directly into the motherboard?


Not only is it no better, it's worse. Use of a card on PCI
bus adds latency and contention for PCI bus time. Of the
two options, get an ATA133 version of that drive.



Option B: Convert SATA port on the hard drive to PATA and use standard 40 pin IDE cable to
connect drive directly to motherboard. If I do this, is the transfer rate still limited
to 133 mb/sec even though the drive supports up to 150 mb/sec?

Yes, but the two numbers are somewhat irrelevant, sustained
read/write speeds are well under 80MB/s and burst speed from
cache are such a small amount of the time spent.
Realistically a single drive will perform very nearly as
well even from ATA100, and only lose a few % on ATA66...
although the typical ATA66 controller couldn't even support
48Bit LBA, drives that size. Regardless, IIRC it has a peak
sustained read speed still under 66MB/s.


Lastly, which option is better or do they both basically suck?

There's no suck about it, the drive is a good value, a
decent product in a good price per GB. It's not high
performance relative to a Maxtor Maxline or WD Raptor but
they cost quite a bit more per GB too. The drive is a fine
choice if you need more capacity, but supposing you already
had an 18 month old 7K2 40GB drive, then the performance
different wouldn't be very noticable in many uses but
nevertheless higher, which is the right direction to go.

If you're paying near retail for it you might look around a
bit more though, the last Seagates I bought from Outpost.com
was $50 AR for 160GB (ATA100 or maybe ATA133, can't remember
which at the moment). That deal is already dead but
something similar might come around again soon. I would go
with the ATA133 drive though due to it being what your
motherboard natively supports instead of paying a lot more
for same performance and capacity with SATA version of it
plus SATA card or adapter.