Economics of SATA hard drive

Peter van der Goes wrote:
"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
Warra wrote:

Find a cheaper PCI SATA adaptor on ebay.
Question, as our IT support wants to put a SATA drive in my office PC by
using such an adaptor,
is there a performance penalty involved because the adaptor uses the PCI
bus? I want to point it out if there is before they use that option.

TIA!

If by adapter, they mean Controllor card that plugs into the PCI bus.
No problem.

If instead they mean something that plugs into the IDE plug and adapts
to SATA. Potential bad juju.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:03:22 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:


If we were considering a 800MHz CPU (era) system,
it would not be as much of a bottleneck to have that age
of drive on one but even considering the drives of the
Via KT266 era, those DID show the performance penalty,

Bet they didnt with a non boot drive.

Since any kind of testing would be of a synthetic bench or
real world app, not booting or running the OS, it would not
matter if the boot drive or not.



a penalty that can only be expected to be
larger with today's higher performing drive.

Bet it still wouldnt even be detectable with a proper double blind
trial without being able to use a benchmark with a non boot drive.


The difference is there. Some may perceive it and others
may not, but some won't perceive the difference between the
CPU they paid for and the next cheaper one so does that
really validate perceptions?

No it does not.

A system is comprised of many subsystems. Each taken alone
may fall within a threshold of inperception but additively
each minor change will result in a system performance
increase large enough to notice by practically anyone.

In short, paying more to use a SATA card when it ends up
SLOWER is madness.

In article , Rod Speed wrote:
AT LEAST ONE OF WHICH WILL BE NEEDED FOR THE DVD BURNER.

SATA DVD-writers are available from several makers, certainly from Plextor,
Samsung, and MSI. They seem to be typically around 75% more expensive than
the equivalent PATA device; but that will change, I'm sure. In a
hypothetical future system with only one PATA connection the DVD is likely
to be SATA, so that PATA connection will be free.

Nobody is claiming that SATA doesn't have a slight technical advantage, but
there is a price penalty for adopting SATA today, and no persuasive
argument to prefer it. If I were building a new system (with a motherboards
that supported it) I'd fit a SATA drive (and damn the expense), but for
upgrading an old system with no SATA interface I wouldn't think twice about
buying PATA -- I'd just do it. The chances are that that drive will have
died, or its size will seem to laughably small that there's no point in
reusing it, before PATA interfaces become so rare as to be a problem.

Cheers,
Daniel.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 01:20:33 +0200, "Folkert Rienstra"
wrote:

"kony" wrote in message
On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:28:59 +0200, "Folkert Rienstra" wrote:

snip

THEN the PATA card is bought, and possibly then
in PCI Express format which is a further benefit.

They aren't available now, so why would they be available then.
If you hadn't noticed, PCI IDE is being phased out now already.

PCI express cards are still being developed,

Nope, there's plenty of SATA PCIe cards around. Just no IDE ones.



There are a few, but "plenty"? I don't think so. Having a
select few cards for a given function is hardly a market
saturation. I am confident there will be multiple times as
many PCI Express cards available in the next few years.





So we see with most add-on card functionality, there is no reason to
expect otherwise with PATA cards,

Yes there is. The market is trying to tell you something.

The market tries to make $ in individual cases, there will
be cards. Wait and see.




especially since there are still quite a few new PATA products
being sold but modern motherboards are cutting back to only
one PATA channel.

Which clearly shows you what market the PATA drives are directed at.

They're directed at systems exactly like the one the OP has.
I'm still in disbelief that this thread even exists, that
people are trying to make such a simple thing as buying the
drive type supported by the system, an order of magnitude
more difficult in the end.




75MB/s is still sufficient for single drive use.
For more drives too when not reading sequentially.

Sufficent can depend on your definition, as it is still a reduction

Nope, that is not what sufficient means.

yes it is EXACTLY what sufficient means, everyone does not
have the same criteria. What is fast enough for one user
may not be for another, or another use/same user.





and this already seen without any other contention for bus throughput.

In the burst rate. Not in the sustained transfer rate of a single drive.

Actually I've benched drives on KT2666/333 chipsets for
sustained rate too. Same drive is noticably slower on a PCI
IDE card (in this case it was a Promise FastTrack100).

This was a while back but vaguely it was a Maxtor Plus 8 or
9 and the figures were something like 35 MB/s on the PCI
card and 52MB/s on the motherboard's southbridge integral
controller. This was before even trying to do anything else
significant on the PCI bus like network transfers or audio,
with the latter known to be effected as well.

"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...


Yes, but his is an older system where you wont notice anything.

I want to point it out if there is before they use that option.

Depending on what is put on the drive, you may not notice
anything much, speed wise. You need to be using the drive
pretty aggressively to see any effect of the PCI bus.

Thanks, Rod.

Rod Speed wrote:

I have 2 systems with two PCI PATA cards in them
currently. Cables are quite manageable if one merely
chooses the right length of cable, rounded if desirable.

No thanks, I'm not stupid enough to flout the ATA standard.

You dont need to with SATA.

You ignore his point that cables are quite manageable. Period. Even
with flat PATA cables.

Ed Light wrote:

"Oscar Jones" (Ron Speed) wrote in message
...
Ed Light wrote:

Hmm I'd like to filter out belligerents. Guess I'll start with Rod.

No one gives a fly red **** what you do or do not read.

You havent managed to contribute a damned thing either.
OK -- belligerent 2. Bye. Filtering ...

Ron^Hd always respondes to a plonking with a nym-shifted response. No
need to kill the one-time-use name.

chrisv wrote:
Rod Speed wrote:


I have 2 systems with two PCI PATA cards in them
currently. Cables are quite manageable if one merely
chooses the right length of cable, rounded if desirable.

No thanks, I'm not stupid enough to flout the ATA standard.

You dont need to with SATA.


You ignore his point that cables are quite manageable. Period. Even
with flat PATA cables.


He has ignored most logical statements. He obviously doesn't know what
he's talking about.

But the problem is that he's leading other into BAD buying decisions.

chrisv wrote:

Ed Light wrote:


"Oscar Jones" (Ron Speed) wrote in message
...

Ed Light wrote:


Hmm I'd like to filter out belligerents. Guess I'll start with Rod.

No one gives a fly red **** what you do or do not read.

You havent managed to contribute a damned thing either.

OK -- belligerent 2. Bye. Filtering ...


Ron^Hd always respondes to a plonking with a nym-shifted response. No
need to kill the one-time-use name.


Rug Spud doesn't have any more to say. His statements contradict
published objective testing results using real-world systems. He even
contradicts hiimself.

He's lost this round and proven he doesn't have any clue about hard
drive performance. He's probably just some 14-year-old kid.

If anybody is listening to him, they place themselves in the same category.

"Ed Light" wrote in message news:woGmg.248$lv.161@fed1read12
Hmm I'd like to filter out belligerents. Guess I'll start with Rod.

You are definetely in the wrong post, this time.