Serial ATA PCI Cards

[cybertalus]

I got a little holiday cash and have been thinking about using it to do a computer upgrade. Right now the major bottleneck on my self-built machine is the hard drive. It's an IDE, and running at 100 whatevers instead of 133 due to my choice of motherboards. As it stands now if a program does a hard drive intensive process it tends to bring the machine to a standstill.

With all this in mind I'm pondering getting a PCI card to add Serial ATA capacity to my computer. One review at newegg claimed to get a huge boost out of using a SATA card with an existing IDE hard drive and a SATA to IDE adapter. I'm curious if anyone here has done this and if they've gotten a performance boost out of it?

 

[Vascant]

First before even spending any money, might want to check out the Bus speed of your PCI slots. I went the reverse, I have SATA on the MB with 2 IDE Channels on the MB and 2 additional IDE Channels from a PCI card. Now there was some initial conflict over which drive would be the start up drive, seems SATA has a mind of it's own. I gave up challanging it after 2 days and just let it set how things would work and has been fine ever since. Also make sure your OS can support SATA from the word go, this will save you some head aches later.

Over all, I am happy though.

 

[cybertalus]

Thanks for the input.

OS shouldn't be a problem, unless there's something newer than XP Service Pack 2 out there that I haven't heard about.

Quick glance through the motherboard manual isn't turning up the bus speed on the PCi slots. The processor is using an 800 mhz front side bus, but if I recall correctly from reading up on PCI Express the other day, part of the problem with regular PCI slots is that they've fallen behind other components in terms of bus speed.

 

[Allanon]

SATA does not entail a huge boost in drive speed. The most important factors determining how fast your drive is are:

• Master/Slave, does your harddrive share it's IDE cable with for example a DVD-drive or burner? Giving a drive an separate IDE channel will give it a moderate speedboost.
• Partitions, is your drive partitioned in multiple volumes? Repartitioning it to a single volume will give you more performance because multiple partitions will cause a drive to have to shift position more slowing it down.
• RPM, the higher the RPM the faster ik can rotate to the desired data (ofcourse this means that it also produces more sound)
• Cache size, a 2mb cache size is slower than a 8mb cache size.
• Fragmentation, if you are not a regular user of defragmentation software this could give your exisiting system a huge boost by running defrag.
• The drives manufacturer, some drives are faster for certain kind of operations, this differs between manufacturers and shouldn't matter a whole lot.

The difference between ata100 and ata133 aren't all that big, and sata doesn't at a whole lot to it. The matter of the fact is that although sata has more bandwidth dan ata133 most (if not all) drives cannot use all of that bandwidth. Only data read directly from the diskcache reaches those speeds and the diskcache on modern drives isn't larger than 8 mb, which means that everything larger than 8 mb needs to be read from the disk. And if your disk is also fragmented it needs to read it from different parts of the platter slowing the proces down even more.

If on the other hand your thinking of doing RAID 0 (Stripping) with two Western Digital Raptors then I've said nothing because that will entail a huge speedboost (just don't create separate partitions).

 

[Rackhir]

Unless you are going to be using a large RAID array (4+ drives), the speed of the PCI slot is unlikely to be a problem. Though different drive controllers in PCI slots can conflict as Vascant mentioned.

Sata drives do have some advantages that could make them faster than an equivalent IDE drive.

A) They are generally newer designs and thus tend to be somewhat faster than older ones. Ex. Most current drives offer 8mb caches, most older only have 2mb or less and some of the newest Maxtor drives (250 gig - 300 gig) have 16mb.

B) The latest SATA drives and controllers support Command queing. An old scsi feature that can offer better performance in situations where multiple commands are being issued to the drives.

RAID 0 configurations, supported by most controllers is sigificantly faster than single drives, but if one drive dies or has a problem. Then you loose what ever is on BOTH drives. So if you do set one up, then make sure you have backups. Since you WILL loose data at some point.

You can pick up a SATA RAID card for about $70+ up to about $200+ for a fairly serious card. Something like that + 4 inexpensive SATA drives (I think 80gig 7200 rpm 8mb cache SATA drives go for about $70/per) will let you set up a raid 10 160gig Storage system that would be very fast and reasonably secure.

 

[Allanon]

Unless you are going to be using a large RAID array (4+ drives), the speed of the PCI slot is unlikely to be a problem. Though different drive controllers in PCI slots can conflict as Vascant mentioned.

Sata drives do have some advantages that could make them faster than an equivalent IDE drive.

A) They are generally newer designs and thus tend to be somewhat faster than older ones. Ex. Most current drives offer 8mb caches, most older only have 2mb or less and some of the newest Maxtor drives (250 gig - 300 gig) have 16mb.

B) The latest SATA drives and controllers support Command queing. An old scsi feature that can offer better performance in situations where multiple commands are being issued to the drives.

RAID 0 configurations, supported by most controllers is sigificantly faster than single drives, but if one drive dies or has a problem. Then you loose what ever is on BOTH drives. So if you do set one up, then make sure you have backups. Since you WILL loose data at some point.

You can pick up a SATA RAID card for about $70+ up to about $200+ for a fairly serious card. Something like that + 4 inexpensive SATA drives (I think 80gig 7200 rpm 8mb cache SATA drives go for about $70/per) will let you set up a raid 10 160gig Storage system that would be very fast and reasonably secure.

If he went for a 200+ RAID card with 4 drives I'd recommend Raid 5. It would give him 240 Gigs of space with 4 80 Gb drives and would be almost as safe. But I'm guessing RAID isn't within the budget.

 

[cybertalus]

Thanks for the information and input everyone. Between the info you all provided and watching the Performance tab under Task Manager when some of the slowness happens, I've pretty much concluded that I'm not likely to benefit much from an upgrade to SATA.

A RAM upgrade might help, as sometimes the available physical memory has dropped to less than 5mb while doing one of these computer-slowing processes (compacting the databases in Agent is the worst culprit). Although I'm not sure even that would do away with the slowness entirely, because I've seen CPU usage hit 100% quite a bit as well.

Oh, and Allanon, my hard drive is on its own IDE cable, isn't partitioned, and I check to see if the drive needs defragging periodically. Since I'm on XP I've been following the recomendation of the Analyze function of the defrag utility, and it seldom recommends defragging. I don't have my hard drive specs handy, but it was top of the line when I bought it in July of '03. The biggest, fastest Maxtor I could find.