Re: PATA sometimes faster than SATA?

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:02:59 -0700 (PDT), "A. J. Moss"
<ajmoss_throwaway_account_001@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A computer I'm looking at has an Abit NF7-S2 motherboard (socket A)
and a 300GB Seagate 7200.8 hard disk (ATA-100). I'm considering
swapping the hard disk for a SATA-150 one of the same type and
capacity.

I haven't yet checked to see if the IDE interfaces are connected
straight to the chipset and the SATA ones to the PCI bus, but if
this is the case, could it follow that the SATA solution (which
would use up about half the PCI bandwidth in sustained transfer
of large files) could actually be slower than the IDE one?

http://file.abit.com.tw/pub/download/manual/english/nf7_series.pdf
but it's useless for this - doesn't have a bus diagram in.

Potentially but not usually, unless you have something using up more
than the other half of the PCI bandwidth (eg a gigabit NIC or two
streaming the same data). And if you were doing stuff that made you
care about that, then you'd want a machine with PCI-X or PCIe.

It's a Silicon Image 3112 running the SATA, which I'm pretty sure is a
PCI hosted chip.

I'm sure you know, but the two disks won't transfer at different
speeds if they're both 7200.8 mechanisms.

On a similar note, one of my older computers has an Abit NF7-S v2
motherboard (socket A) and a Silicon Image two-port IDE RAID PCI
card, to which are attached four 500GB Seagate 7200.9 hard disks
(ATA-100) in a RAID-0. It will only be storing multi-GB files.

To optimise the throughput, the drive order is set to PM-SM-PS-SS,
instead of the default PM-PS-SM-SS. Would it also be beneficial
to set the stripe size to 512KB, rather than the default 128KB?

It ought to be - reduces the chances of a single write hitting two
disks on the same ribbon.

I bet it makes sod all difference in practice though. If you have time
to experiment with benchmarking different configs, would you post them
back here?

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would
have kept it for themselves." - Joseph Lane Kirkland
.

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