Discussion
Hi folks,
about to buy a new hard disk and figured I might as well go for a SATA one. Up until now I've only ever used standard ATA IDE drives though, so jsut wanted to check there are no big "gotcha"s...
I have a Gigabyte GA-7VM400MF-P motherboard which (according to the website) supports SATA, although the manual is a bit vague, only really mentioning SATA RAID. The board has the SATA connectors though.
Is there any particular type of drive I should go for? Been looking at this Western Digital drive (SATA300, 16MB cache), any reason why my slightly older mobo wouldn't work OK with it? According to Gigabyte the SATA interface will transfer data at up to 150MB/s - I'm guessing SATA300 in the drive description means it will do double this, but presumably it will still be OK running at the slower speed?
Cheers!
about to buy a new hard disk and figured I might as well go for a SATA one. Up until now I've only ever used standard ATA IDE drives though, so jsut wanted to check there are no big "gotcha"s...
I have a Gigabyte GA-7VM400MF-P motherboard which (according to the website) supports SATA, although the manual is a bit vague, only really mentioning SATA RAID. The board has the SATA connectors though.
Is there any particular type of drive I should go for? Been looking at this Western Digital drive (SATA300, 16MB cache), any reason why my slightly older mobo wouldn't work OK with it? According to Gigabyte the SATA interface will transfer data at up to 150MB/s - I'm guessing SATA300 in the drive description means it will do double this, but presumably it will still be OK running at the slower speed?
Cheers!
NiceCupOfTea said:
Hi folks,
about to buy a new hard disk and figured I might as well go for a SATA one. Up until now I've only ever used standard ATA IDE drives though, so jsut wanted to check there are no big "gotcha"s...
I have a Gigabyte GA-7VM400MF-P motherboard which (according to the website) supports SATA, although the manual is a bit vague, only really mentioning SATA RAID. The board has the SATA connectors though.
Is there any particular type of drive I should go for? Been looking at this Western Digital drive (SATA300, 16MB cache), any reason why my slightly older mobo wouldn't work OK with it? According to Gigabyte the SATA interface will transfer data at up to 150MB/s - I'm guessing SATA300 in the drive description means it will do double this, but presumably it will still be OK running at the slower speed?
Cheers!
about to buy a new hard disk and figured I might as well go for a SATA one. Up until now I've only ever used standard ATA IDE drives though, so jsut wanted to check there are no big "gotcha"s...
I have a Gigabyte GA-7VM400MF-P motherboard which (according to the website) supports SATA, although the manual is a bit vague, only really mentioning SATA RAID. The board has the SATA connectors though.
Is there any particular type of drive I should go for? Been looking at this Western Digital drive (SATA300, 16MB cache), any reason why my slightly older mobo wouldn't work OK with it? According to Gigabyte the SATA interface will transfer data at up to 150MB/s - I'm guessing SATA300 in the drive description means it will do double this, but presumably it will still be OK running at the slower speed?
Cheers!
When you order the drive, remember to order a SATA cable if you don't already have one...
nicecupoftea said:
What do the power connectors look like? do they not take the standard 4 pin hard drive ones?
No, they're much thinner and tend to be black. You can either get a little convertor or get a newer PSU that has them on allready.
Like this - www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=2HSL
Probably worth pointing out that the transfer speed across the interface itself is far higher than the speed at which data can be read or written to the disc itself, so unless you are geting signifacantly faster discs than you've had before, you're not going to notice much of a performance improvement purely by upgrading the interface from one of the faster ATA standards to SATA. Nowt wrong with SATA of course.
That Daddy said:
even at 150MB/s for the sata drives,there still faster than the IDE drives max of 133MB/s,but 300MB/s sata would be more of a bonus,why dont you go onto support for your mainboard to see what drives it supports.
Although it's theoretical maximum. Unless you heavily invest in RAID a single drive will do perhaps 50MB/s - 60BB/s on the average with burst and cache hits giving it an apparent speed boost. Not that their is anything wrong with a fast data bus on a drive, especially if you get lucky on cache hits, but you probably won't see close to 150MB/s or 300MB/s.
My ATA133 units (7200rpm, but not super high end) can push about 60MB/s between them (they're on seperate controllers) which is nowhere near the max.
ThePassenger said:
That Daddy said:
even at 150MB/s for the sata drives,there still faster than the IDE drives max of 133MB/s,but 300MB/s sata would be more of a bonus,why dont you go onto support for your mainboard to see what drives it supports.
Although it's theoretical maximum. Unless you heavily invest in RAID a single drive will do perhaps 50MB/s - 60BB/s on the average with burst and cache hits giving it an apparent speed boost. Not that their is anything wrong with a fast data bus on a drive, especially if you get lucky on cache hits, but you probably won't see close to 150MB/s or 300MB/s.
My ATA133 units (7200rpm, but not super high end) can push about 60MB/s between them (they're on seperate controllers) which is nowhere near the max.
Agreed, thats why i use Raid 0(striped)Raptors,yes i back everything up on to an external drive for obvious reasons,i use it for gaming.
That Daddy said:
Agreed, thats why i use Raid 0(striped)Raptors,yes i back everything up on to an external drive for obvious reasons,i use it for gaming.
Ah hah ... interesting ... I'm thinking about using a pair of striped SATA Raptors to encourage a bit of performance out of a database. Any idea what sort of sustained performance you're getting with that set up? (p.s. ATG's Rule #1: data redundancy is for girls)got a pair of ide's and a pair of sata 1's, had issues in the past, so 120 gb ide boot, 160gb (150gb formatted) ide data, then pair of 150gb formatted sata drives for games and more data.
raid is nice until one fials and u lose both, sata connectors and power connectors not always come with the drive and u need to make sure they are sorted
raid is nice until one fials and u lose both, sata connectors and power connectors not always come with the drive and u need to make sure they are sorted
ATG said:
That Daddy said:
Agreed, thats why i use Raid 0(striped)Raptors,yes i back everything up on to an external drive for obvious reasons,i use it for gaming.
Ah hah ... interesting ... I'm thinking about using a pair of striped SATA Raptors to encourage a bit of performance out of a database. Any idea what sort of sustained performance you're getting with that set up? (p.s. ATG's Rule #1: data redundancy is for girls)to be honest the differance is not massive but it is worthwhile,i would say mirror is more practical,but when your going for it overclocked/watercooling etc it all helps,and yes if its not stable your waisting your time,it is but it as not been without problems,mostly memory.
Edited by That Daddy on Saturday 17th February 18:35
I just installed a pair of 500GB SATA disks (WD RE2's) in one of my PCs and was torn between RAID0 and RAID1 as I would appreciate the performance but don't need all-out redundancy as I keep several backups.
Then it occured to me whilst fiddling with the RAID controller that I could create multiple logical RAID volumes on the same pair of disks.
So I created a RAID1 for my O/S and important docs, etc. and a RAID0 for anything less important.
Seems to work pretty well and offers the best of both worlds.
Of course the best solution, if you can spare the cash and have space, is four disks in RAID10.
Then it occured to me whilst fiddling with the RAID controller that I could create multiple logical RAID volumes on the same pair of disks.
So I created a RAID1 for my O/S and important docs, etc. and a RAID0 for anything less important.
Seems to work pretty well and offers the best of both worlds.
Of course the best solution, if you can spare the cash and have space, is four disks in RAID10.
NiceCupOfTea said:
What's so good about Raptors? OK, the seek times are slightly lower and spin at 10k RPM but they seem only to be available in small capacities, and cost 3 times as much for half the capacity...
The seek times are considerably lower (4.6ms for the 150GB drive versus ~8.5 for 'mainstream' SATA drives i.e. 45% difference) so random access performance is improved dramatically. Plus I understand that they are engineered to more-or-less enterprise standards and should have a much higher mean-time-between-failure.
OK so not ideal if you want 500GB+ of cheap drive space in your home PC but if you want the best SATA performance possible and you're prepared to pay a bit extra for it...
NiceCupOfTea said:
Thanks all, ordered the WD 250GB in the above link with a drive cable (my PSU has the power already).
How easy is it to make a machine boot from one? (I assume it's an option in the BIOS like IDE, SCSI, SATA?)
How easy is it to make a machine boot from one? (I assume it's an option in the BIOS like IDE, SCSI, SATA?)
Varies from bios to bios, generally speaking you set it to boot from hard disk, then theres an option somewhere for 'hard disk boot order' which you arrange to have the sata disk at the top. Thats if you've got more than one hard disk, if its sata only it tends to just work.
If you're installing windows fresh on the new disk I'd disconnect the old one completely while you do it, then reconnect it afterwards if you want to (this removes vaious opportunities for confusion and mistakes during the process)
HTH
Neil
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