1TB hard drive on PATA machine

"Peter Chant" wrote in message
...

Don't suppose there is anything to stop me looping a cable from the eSATA
port back into the machine - apart from ugliness.

You can with an eSATA to SATA adapter cable.

Extra Value Serial ATA 2 Port PCI Card £12.99 inc vat
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/48670/...oduct_overview

On Sat, 09 May 2009 13:24:18 +0100, Peter Chant
wrote:

Any thoughts?

Existing system is PATA only, PCI & AGP, no PCI-E.

PATA drives seem rare and relatively expensive for the amount of storage you
get and at maximum seem to be 500GB. If I want to upgrade this machine to
1TB the only feasible way looks like external firewire drive plus firewire
card. Perhaps my existing old firewire card will suffice.

Alternative would be to upgrade mobo, CPU, memory and graphics - don't
really want to do that quite yet.

Any thoughts?

Pete

On Sat, 09 May 2009 15:17:13 GMT, (Gerard
Bok) wrote:

On Sat, 09 May 2009 13:24:18 +0100, Peter Chant
wrote:

Existing system is PATA only, PCI & AGP, no PCI-E.

PATA drives seem rare and relatively expensive for the amount of storage you
get and at maximum seem to be 500GB. If I want to upgrade this machine to
1TB the only feasible way looks like external firewire drive plus firewire
card. Perhaps my existing old firewire card will suffice.

Alternative would be to upgrade mobo, CPU, memory and graphics - don't
really want to do that quite yet.

Any thoughts?

First of all: what are your objectives ?
Add 1 TB to an existing system ?
In that case: buy an external drive.

Adding internal SATA drives to a system that doesn't support SATA
is hardly an upgrade.

Since he was talking about capacity, yes it'll be a capacity
upgrade.

80 MB/s+ is a reasonable speed for modern
drives. Don't expect any bridged drive to run faster than some
30 MB/s. (I don't mean testbed speed but real speed in a system
like yours, the PATA, PCI & AGP only class PCs)


Quite untrue. Yes using a PCI controller card will
bottleneck the best of the modern SATA drives, but it will
be nowhere near a 80MB/s vs 30MB/s difference.

The performance difference will be a lot closer to 15%.

The OP has four reasonable options depending on needs.

1) Buy an external enclosure with the type desired, whether
it be USB2, eSATA, or firewire.

2) Buy more than one internal PATA drives to arrive at the
desired capacity.

3) Buy an SATA PCI controller card. The performance
difference won't be enough to worry about, unless the system
is constantly using high bandwidth PCI cards.

4) Decide this is the right time to move on, to upgrade to
a native SATA capable motherboard, CPU and memory.

#4 holds the most promise for overall performance if that is
a primary concern. On the other hand, a PCI SATA controller
card is the least work to add an additional drive if it's
not running the OS so it needs not be reconfigured or
reinstalled to look to the SATA controller for the OS boot
volume.

Most of the performance limits of modern mechanical HDDs is
still the drive itself, not the interface or bridge
(southbridge vs PCI, etc). It takes some fairly demanding
benchmarks that emulate atypical access patterns for a PC to
see substantial differences... and in the end, the topic was
adding capacity, not making things run faster. Accessing
files large enough they need 1TB of storage space will often
be more constrained by factors other than HDD or drive
controller bus performance a lot of the time.

Gerard Bok wrote:

Yes. And the plural form of 'disks was probably intentional :-)


Daily backup to an external drive connected to a Linksys NSLU2.

Approx monthly backup to a second external drive.

External disk tend to have relatively high failing rates.
Given their pricetags nowadays you should secure the pictures on
more than one drive.
And it is wise to select one with a minimum of 2 years warranty.


Imagine my annoyance just before christmas when external hard drive and
system drive (have two in this PC) failed within a week of each other.
Luckily for the external drive it was the PSU.

Pete


--
http://www.petezilla.co.uk

Andy wrote:

Extra Value Serial ATA 2 Port PCI Card £12.99 inc vat
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/48670/...oduct_overview


Thank you.
--
http://www.petezilla.co.uk

kony wrote:

4) Decide this is the right time to move on, to upgrade to
a native SATA capable motherboard, CPU and memory.

#4 holds the most promise for overall performance if that is
a primary concern. On the other hand, a PCI SATA controller
card is the least work to add an additional drive if it's
not running the OS so it needs not be reconfigured or
reinstalled to look to the SATA controller for the OS boot
volume.

PC will need to be upgraded in the next year, performance is _sometimes_ a
bit of an issue. However, don't want to be force to upgrade just because
I've made another purchase.

Would perhaps would be keener if this motherboard were more suitable for a
media PC but alas the on board sound is poor and the media PC case I have
will only take two cards - ie graphics and TV (frame grabber) or audio.

Pete

--
http://www.petezilla.co.uk

On Sun, 10 May 2009 11:22:12 +0100, Peter Chant
wrote:

kony wrote:

4) Decide this is the right time to move on, to upgrade to
a native SATA capable motherboard, CPU and memory.

#4 holds the most promise for overall performance if that is
a primary concern. On the other hand, a PCI SATA controller
card is the least work to add an additional drive if it's
not running the OS so it needs not be reconfigured or
reinstalled to look to the SATA controller for the OS boot
volume.

PC will need to be upgraded in the next year, performance is _sometimes_ a
bit of an issue. However, don't want to be force to upgrade just because
I've made another purchase.

Would perhaps would be keener if this motherboard were more suitable for a
media PC but alas the on board sound is poor and the media PC case I have
will only take two cards - ie graphics and TV (frame grabber) or audio.

Pete

A combo like a lower end Athlon X2 and 780G chipset
motherboard and memory can be had for about $150 total. The
780G integrated video would be strong enough for a media PC
and it's gigabit ethernet would allow fair performance
sharing the drive with whichever system needs the extra
storage space. It'll be a lot slower throughput than direct
SATA access in the same system, but it could kill two birds
with one stone until later when you upgrade the first
system.

Update in case anyone is interested. A little odd, originally worryingly
flakey but now seems OK.

1TB Samsung disk,
PCI SATA adapter VIA6421A based.
State of the Ark KT400 based motherboard.
Linux, kernel 2.6.27.7


No issue with linux seeing the controller, already had it compiled in the
kernel.

No problem finding disk.

Partitioned disk no problems.

Formatting disk, problematic, repeated errors on SATA interface forcing
reboot.

Downloaded Samsung untility to set drive from SATA 300 to SATA 150 to match
card. A pain, XP box would not play ball creating boot floppy nor boot
disk (maybe issue with XP box). Did not work under qemu / dosemu on linux
box (long shot).

- Solution, download freedos image and copy to floppy,
copy Samsung tools onto freedos disk. Worked well. Set drive to 150.

SATA interface errors persisted. Disabled IDE controllers on mobo and
various other unused onboard peripherals to reduce chances of conflicts,
especially IRQ's. Still flakey. Does not seem to be power as no
difference in reliability between having three hard drives (2 old 1 new)
and just the new drive.

Formatted disk after some persistence.

Copied across 290GB of data with no problems. Mounted new disk in place of
old one.

Running with new disk now to see how it pans out.

+++

This is all a bit odd. Formatting was very flakey but now everything seems
rock solid. I am sure the copying would have been a good "burn in" test if
there were any persistant problems.







--
http://www.petezilla.co.uk

On Fri, 15 May 2009 17:29:28 +0100, Peter Chant
wrote:


SATA interface errors persisted. Disabled IDE controllers on mobo and
various other unused onboard peripherals to reduce chances of conflicts,
especially IRQ's. Still flakey. Does not seem to be power as no
difference in reliability between having three hard drives (2 old 1 new)
and just the new drive.

Formatted disk after some persistence.

Copied across 290GB of data with no problems. Mounted new disk in place of
old one.

Running with new disk now to see how it pans out.

+++

This is all a bit odd. Formatting was very flakey but now everything seems
rock solid. I am sure the copying would have been a good "burn in" test if
there were any persistant problems.

Run the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic to check the drive.

If I were guessing, I'd guess you had a bad SATA connector,
contact problem and being in the case to unplug and replug
drives had shifted the wires just enough that the connectors
are making better connection now.

kony wrote:


Run the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic to check the drive.

Yes. It gives errors on "Scan MC" and surface scan, all are reported
as "ecc errors". Supplier sent me a courtest email today to see if all was
well so I replied accordingly.


If I were guessing, I'd guess you had a bad SATA connector,
contact problem and being in the case to unplug and replug
drives had shifted the wires just enough that the connectors
are making better connection now.

Tried running the diagnostic in a second newer machine, one with a SATA
interface on the motherboard rather than a PCI interface. Same problems on
the diagnostic. It must be the drive.

A bit of web searching, there does appear to be an issue, but it might be
the drives, it might be the diagnositic utility. However, that does not
account for the hangs whilst attempting to format. Not confidence
inspiring.

Pete

--
http://www.petezilla.co.uk