sata 2 hard drives can run at 300mb/s
if I have 4 x hard drives on a SATA striped raid array does this mean that
(theoretically) I would get the total speed of aprox 4 x 300 = 1200mb/s or
would the overall speed be 300mb/s
TIA
Burst to cache would be 1200MB/sec. That is, if the drive electronics
actually support operation of the cache at the full link rate. Sustained
media rate might be about 240MB/sec for 4 drives with 60MB/sec media
rates, and using space at the beginning of each disk.
The SATA interfaces are affected by the interconnect path from system
memory to the SATA controller. On an Nforce4, with the chipset contained
in one chip, and the chip being connected via a fast HyperTransport
bus, you might actually see 1200MB/sec. For some other chipsets, the
Northbridge to Southbridge bus may limit performance. (Some chipsets
only have a 1066MB/sec bus from Northbridge to Southbridge.) Some
separate controller chips, are not connected to high bandwidth busses,
in which case a much lesser burst to disk drive cache performance would
result. Not every hardware config will achieve 1200MB/sec, so the
number is "highly theoretical".
Paul
