Harris2508

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I'm just wondering if anyone here has any thoughts on the reliability of the new SATA 3.0 drives. Are there any unusual "gotchas" that I should be looking out for?

Thanks everyone! :D

--Bob Harris
 

waylander

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sata is an interface, the hard drive will not run that fast. Current hard drives cannot even max out the sata 1 interface so what's the point? Even the I-Ram memory drive is only sata 1 because that's all it can use.
 

Harris2508

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So, if I understand what you are saying, there is no point in acquiring one of the newer SATA drives because it would really make no significant difference?

I'm looking at a new MB. It has one IDE port which is really intended for the optical drives. The SATA ports are listed as 3.0 in the spec sheets. So I'll have to get some kind of SATA drive.

Am I correct that all SATA drives are compatible with the ports, even if they are 3.0? Kind of like USB 2 v. USB 1?

Thanks for your reply. I sincerely appreciate it! :D

--Bob
 

nobly

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Ok 3.0 is the Gbps speed of SATA 2.0. There are no HDD's today with a SATA 3.0 version naming convention.

SATA 2.0 is 3.0 Gbps = 300MB/s (it loses some bandwidth from overhead).

Any single SATA HDD will not be able to max that bandwidth out. Raptors (touted as the fastest HDDs around) max out at 80MB/s.

You only really need SATA 2.0 if you have lots of RAID 0'd drives or big RAID arrays.

If you want to go into the SATA 2.0 realm, I suggest you look at the other features of the HDD, such as NCQ, etc. You can also use the HDD charts at tomshardware to get a better idea of what benchmarks are available.

SATA 2.0 is backwards compatible with SATA 1.0. (That would really suck if it wasn't)
 

Dante_Jose_Cuervo

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I'm with you on this. I don't really under stand why they have SATA II if they haven't even filled up the SATA 1.0 bandwidth yet. Also, they do have a SATA III coming out at 600 MB/s which unless you're somehow using that to transfer a whole archive (even then it's limited by the HDD's) You'd never even come close to filling up that bandwidth.

However, from what I've seen, the I-Ram actually does fill up the bandwidth of a SATA I port and probably could even fill up a SATA 2 port just because RAM is many times faster than an HDD.
 

nobly

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Well, I can see the need for SATA 2.0 in certain situations.
Since its a theoretical max of 300MB/s and HDDs max out at around 60-80MB/s sustained, you can derive that about 4 HDD's that are RAID 0'd can come close to maxing out the 300MB/s.

So there is an application with RAID'd arrays, but to the wide consumer base, no real difference in terms of speed.

The real differences (at least for most of the consumers) between SATA 2.0 and 1.0 are the progression in technologies and protocols like NCQ, etc.
http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp

But really I see SATA 2.0 and 3.0 for more business/server applications to compete w/ SCSI, etc.
 

4Aces

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If you have a NForce 4 chipset motherboard DO NOT get a maxtor sata drive. They will eventually not be seen by the system, won't be detected in the array and no boot into windows. This was supposedly a problem with SATA II but I've had it happen with SATA drives as well. Maxtor will provide you with new firmware to flash but it doesn't make a bit of difference. Samsung, WD or maybe Hitachi but not Maxtor.
 

DrNeil

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That could be why my old Maxtor SATA drive isn't even detected by my new NF4 board... I won't bother trying to fix that one then....
 

waylander

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So, if I understand what you are saying, there is no point in acquiring one of the newer SATA drives because it would really make no significant difference?

I'm looking at a new MB. It has one IDE port which is really intended for the optical drives. The SATA ports are listed as 3.0 in the spec sheets. So I'll have to get some kind of SATA drive.

Am I correct that all SATA drives are compatible with the ports, even if they are 3.0? Kind of like USB 2 v. USB 1?

Thanks for your reply. I sincerely appreciate it! :D

--Bob

What I'm saying is that I wouldn't pay extra for it. For instance, right now ide, sata and sataII drives are virtually the same price so getting a sataII drive is fine because you aren't paying for something you can't use anyway.

As to the I-Ram, Ram is indeed faster in read / write times but from what I've read they barely max out the sataI speed of 150mb/s (maybe a bit higher) and I guess the maker decided that that was enough. I'm sure that future solid state hdd's will definitely be sataII or 3 but as it stands there is no significant gain.
 

dimwhited

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for a mobo i would deffinately make sure it was sata 2.0 compliant... you never know where the hdd industry will go in the next few years, and your more likely to upgrade your hdd before your mobo

but for right now, it doesnt matter. big raid 0 arrays are pointless and you will probalby never use one (even though i REALLY want to raid 0 ten raptor x's to have 1.5 tb of raptorness... :lol: )
 

dimwhited

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it really depends on the drive. look to see what its transfer rates are on sata, and if they are higher then pata, then yeah, you will see a difference.

I would go ahead and get sata, because if you want to upgrade your mobo before your hdd, you might not have enough pata ports. pata is getting phased out, and for only a few extra dollars, i think sata is deffinately worth it, just from a compatability standpoint
 

nobly

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I'd say PATA will be around until all the optical drive manufacturer's start cranking about SATA drives. After they all switch, give PATA a year or two to die.

Besides, there's always SATA to PATA adapters.
 

dimwhited

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if your buying high end parts though, pata wont be around for as long as you want. I bought my "high end" mobo about a year ago, and it only has 2 pci slots (i heard those were going to take a few years to die out), and only 2 for pata. if you have 3 optical drives and 1 hdd, your screwed for upgrades. If your going to stay mainstream though, pata wont be bad
 

Dante_Jose_Cuervo

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Well, I can see the need for SATA 2.0 in certain situations.
Since its a theoretical max of 300MB/s and HDDs max out at around 60-80MB/s sustained, you can derive that about 4 HDD's that are RAID 0'd can come close to maxing out the 300MB/s.

So there is an application with RAID'd arrays, but to the wide consumer base, no real difference in terms of speed.


Well I can see what you're saying but that actually isn't necessarily true since each of the drives would get a dedicated 300MB/s (hence the SERIAL part) so you'd still have a highly underutlized bus. As for the whole I-ram thing I see a lot of possibility with that.
 

DrNeil

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I think PATA will survive longer than that, because the majority of people have perfectly good PATA devices, and wouldn't want to change them.
Serial ports still exist, even though hardly anyone uses them... PATA will probably do the same...
 

warstrider

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sata is an interface, the hard drive will not run that fast. Current hard drives cannot even max out the sata 1 interface so what's the point? Even the I-Ram memory drive is only sata 1 because that's all it can use.

well said
 

vic20

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There is something missing here.....

Its true hard drives cannot sustain a speed capable of saturating SATA I, but they can perform cached burst speeds well exceeding that. So SATAII drives can burst at higher speeds.

Trouble is, they are not fully backward compatible. I've had to jumper Seagate SATAII drives to SATAI because VIA doesn't make a controller to recognize them.

There are other issues as well. You should disable command queing on nVidia controllers with many SATAII drives to avoid slow bootups and data corruption. Especially when using multiple drives. (I've even tried silicon image controllers on nVidia motherboards and I still got data corruption on some drives. Seems to be a chipset rather than a controller issue.)

As a side note, the best way to get a fast drive on a nVidia board is to use raptors. The TCQ they use doesn't seem to have any data corruption issues with these chipsets. Built quite a few machines this way and have yet to experience any issues.
 

nobly

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Well I can see what you're saying but that actually isn't necessarily true since each of the drives would get a dedicated 300MB/s (hence the SERIAL part) so you'd still have a highly underutlized bus. As for the whole I-ram thing I see a lot of possibility with that.
This isn't true for the most part of what a typical end-user sees. It really depends on the controller you have.
Alot of mainstream controllers use a port multiplier, so the 4 SATA ports you have on your board aren't all single SATA channels. Those 4 share a single SATA channel that has the 300MB/s bandwidth.

nVidia, in one of their newer chipsets, has 2 channels for the 4 SATA ports. They call it some magical new term when its just an old trick. Other controllers have a port multiplier to get 4 SATA ports on one channel. Others still have each SATA port for each SATA channel.