Economics of SATA hard drive

[Rod Speed]

Question, as our IT support wants to put a SATA drive in my office PC by using such an
adaptor, is there a performance penalty involved because the adaptor uses the PCI bus?

Yes, but his is an older system where you wont notice anything.

I want to point it out if there is before they use that option.

Depending on what is put on the drive, you may not notice
anything much, speed wise. You need to be using the drive
pretty aggressively to see any effect of the PCI bus.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod has anticipated my concern. I'm not upgrading yet but when
I do (maybe in 12 months) I expect the mobo manufacturers will
have pared back any spare IDE capacity to almost nothing.

Yeah, there are already systems being sold with just
one IDE port, two drives, just for the optical drives.

Since thats essentially due to the chipset design,
I expect that that will be quite common in future.

Altho to be fair I guess there will always be one spare IDE slot
because the DVD or CD will use one slot on an P-IDE port and
the other one will be spare. But one PATA hard drive is not much.

Yeah, it would limit you pretty drastically.

 

[Rod Speed]

yes, that's why if/when the time comes after that next
system is purchased, one could buy the PCI IDE card.

Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a
PCI SATA card now. No point in crippling the new decent
performance system by having the hard drives on a PCI card.

Actually, I'd expect by that time there would be
PCI Express PATA cards in the market enough
for them to be price-competitive and choose
that over the 32bit/33Mhz PCI alternative.

Unlikely to be price competitive to a PCI SATA card now
since there will be little demand for PCI Express PATA cards.

Yes, it is a sad irony that with all the great transitions going
on, many people are left with less versatile systems for their
real-world uses. I still look for boards with maximum # of
PCI slots, particularly towards the bottom of the board so
they aren't conflicting with good video card cooling if utilized.

That does radically limit your choices tho, particularly
if you want a competitively priced motherboard.

And I dont have many cards at all in the newer systems now,
essentially because everything comes standard except for a
gaming class video card and I dont even bother with those,
tho I do add a decent dual head video card to all systems now.

?? How far into the future does one need to look?

Just far enough to notice that there are already motherboards
with just one IDE port, and bugger all card slots.

Since PATA channel(s) on still on new boards and backwards compatible,

Not necessarily enough of them tho. If you want two
optical drives, you're stuffed if its only got one IDE port.

it could even make more sense to have the PATA drive
for data recovery purposes, IF one didn't have any other
SATA capable systems yet. IOW, new system goes
down and user only had the old PATA capable one.

You can always cripple along with just one optical
drive in that recovery situation if you need to.

Yes but it seems the least relevant issue, I don't
recall a lot of users having any system functionality
problems because of the PATA cable.

They can do when the ATA standard cable isnt long
enough and they need to use a non standard one.

Certainly SATA is more esthetically pleasing and very
convenient for eSATA drives... I'm not against SATA
at all but at this point in time either can work equally well

Yes, but the longer standard SATA cable can be handy too.

and having to buy a card later is a minor
expense, if necessary which it may not be.

Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a PCI SATA
card now, off ebay, from a retail operation that sells on ebay.

Nope, we don't know that OP would ever need to buy a card at all.

Unlikely that he'll be happy with just one hard drive and one
optical drive. He's already got more than that in his dinosaur.

It's entirely conceivable that if a PATA drive were bought
today, next system will have one free PATA position... or
at worst, THEN the PATA card is bought, and possibly
then in PCI Express format which is a further benefit.

Makes a lot more sense to cripple the dinosaur,
not the new one and not limit which motherboard
you can use in the new system.

SATA over PCI is often slower too.

Sure, but its a slow old dinosaur anyway, bet he wont even notice.

Looking beyond the synthetic benchmarks, most people
have nic or sound, etc, on their PCI bus already.

Most people are irrelevant, what matters is what he has in his dinosaur.

It can be expected at least 15% slower in many uses,

And if its not the boot drive, I bet he wont even notice that.

that's significant enough to perceive when the
HDD is already the bottleneck for many uses.

Not when its not the boot drive.

Have you ever actually TRIED a PCI card on that chipset?

Yep, its quite feasible.

I have... benched it too. Don't recall the scores but
did recall the very significant difference in use of a
PCI controller on that and prior, next gen Via chipsets.

Sure, but its already a slow old dinosaur, that isnt
going to change with a non boot drive on a PCI card.

Google for the info if you don't believe,

If you Google,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Via+KT266+PCI+ATA+benchmarks

look at the very first hit, it happens to be KT266A...
http://www.tecchannel.de/ueberblick/archiv/401770/index3.html

... and this is even BEFORE one tries to use the PCI
bus for other concurrent things like audio or whatever.

Its a slow old dinosaur, no news.

In computing most things are typical, but occasionally
some things stand out as very good or bad. Via
chipsets PCI performance in that era were very bad.

Bullshit, they're just mediocre performers.

 

[Rod Speed]

Kony, my chipset is actually the Via KT266A.

I think Via brought out the 266A chipset because
of problems with the original 266 chipset.
Correct.

(1) Does the A chipset suffer the same
low PCI throughput which you mention?

Its quite adequate for a PCI SATA
adapter with a single SATA drive on it.

(2) I already have a PCI controller card for PATA.
Would that indicate to me the sort of performance
I would get if I installed a PCI card for SATA?

Yep.

 

[Rod Speed]

no need to prove what is common knowledge.

There is no problem doing it, IDT (independant
device timing) means the HDD will run at full
speed unless the optical was a PIO drive.

And its trivial to prove anyway, just use a decent benchmark
like HDTach with and without the DVD drive on the cable.

And if you have enough of a clue to be using a DVD burner
because they are so cheap now that its not worth bothering
with DVD readers anymore, plenty of those are ATA100 anyway.

 

[Rod Speed]

It is amazing that today's mindset makes it a problem to
even buy a drive with an interface that actually SUPPORTS
it's use instead of buying a PCI card.

Not a clue what you are trying to say there.

 

[Rod Speed]

I doubt very much that there will be any motherboards that support
SATA but not PATA within the useful working life of any disk drive
you buy today, and I certainly don't think the majority of boards
will be SATA only for quite some time. Even if such boards were to
become common you will still be able to use one with PATA drives via
a PCI (or PCIe, or whatever the future may bring) interface card.

PATA drives are still slightly cheaper than an equivalent SATA drive,
and while SATA connection may be faster than PATA neither will be
saturated by data coming from one of today's disk drives, so speed
isn't really an issue (and if speed were your primary concern I'd
tell you to get SCSI).

I really don't think it's worth worrying that a PATA drive you buy
today will disadvantage you in any way.

Corse it will if the new system only has a single IDE port.

 

[Merrill P. L. Worthington]

Hasnt worked like that for many years now.

What "hasn't worked like that for many years now." Drive speed? Data
transfer date? DVD running at 66mhz? What?

SATA has the potential for 150mB/sec, but drives can't read or write
that fast.

DVDs detect on my system at 66mhz. That's faster than the hard drive
read/write rate.

Oh bullshit.

Its prefectly OK for you to be wrong.

The fact is that except for modern drives, the read/write rate for a
hard drive does not exceed 60mB. So a parallel interface running at
66mhz would be enough to carry the data at full rate.

Sorry, but thanks for playing.

 

[Merrill P. L. Worthington]

YOU made those stupid pig ignorant claims.

YOU get to do the proving.

THATS how it works.

I have and made you look pretty uninformed.

 

[Merrill P. L. Worthington]

No it doesnt.




No it isnt, its just plain wrong.

It seems you're spreading misinformation. Could you please get your
facts right and stop this line of crap you're spreading?

 

[Derek Baker]

Kony, my chipset is actually the Via KT266A.

I think Via brought out the 266A chipset because of problems with the
original 266 chipset.

(1) Does the A chipset suffer the same low PCI throughput which you
mention?

(2) I already have a PCI controller card for PATA. Would that
indicate to me the sort of performance I would get if I installed a
PCI card for SATA?

I'm not Kony, but I had a KT266A - it's still in my reserve machine -
and the main improvement over the KT266 was in the memory controller. I
had to patch to cut the poor PCI latency.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Yep.

Have you ever been able to get a PC to run with
two PCI cards? If so, what kind were they, i.e.
PATA with SATA, or 2 PATA or 2 SATA, and
what models and brands?

*TimDaniels*

 

[Merrill P. L. Worthington]

Dont need that if you have enough of a clue to buy a SATA drive.

Don't need SATA if you have enough of a clue to understand how a hard
drive works and its speed limitations.

Maybe you should get a clue.

 

[Alex Fraser]

There is no problem doing it, IDT (independant device
timing) means the HDD will run at full speed unless the
optical was a PIO drive.

I used to have an early Zip drive (PIO 1 at best) on the same cable as an
UDMA 100 HDD, attached to a UDMA 66-capable motherboard. There did not seem
to be any measurable impact on HDD performance while the Zip drive was idle.

Alex

 

[kony]

Yes, but his is an older system where you wont notice anything.

It's not THAT old. HDD is the primary bottleneck on many
common uses of a PC even back in the ~ 800MHz CPU era.

 

[kony]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:28:59 +0200, "Folkert Rienstra"

They aren't available now, so why would they be available then.
If you hadn't noticed, PCI IDE is being phased out now already.

PCI express cards are still being developed, we can see this
with any kinds of add-on cards that the 3rd party cards are
trailing behind the motherboard adoption of PCI Express
supportive chipsets. So far only video cards have made a
significant transition, enough to expect a good choice of
technology from most manufacturers.

So we see with most add-on card functionality, there is no
reason to expect otherwise with PATA cards, especially since
there are still quite a few new PATA products being sold but
modern motherboards are cutting back to only one PATA
channel.

75MB/s is still sufficient for single drive use.
For more drives too when not reading sequentially.

Sufficent can depend on your definition, as it is still a
reduction and this already seen without any other contention
for bus throughput. Now more than ever people are building
HTPC or other special needs that can have an impact.

Recall that at that time even using an sound card from the
most popular manufacturer caused a problem, when a PCI IDE
card was used. We haven't even considered any other
devices yet.

 

[kony]

Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a
PCI SATA card now. No point in crippling the new decent
performance system by having the hard drives on a PCI card.

It makes sense to buy a drive that uses the interface the
system supports.

If we are considering that NEXT system, at that point in the
future the best performance won't come from a drive bought
today either, it will come from this future drive
technology, or actually, a combination of two drives.

Further we have not established that the drive bought today
will actually need a PCI PATA card on that next system... it
was just a random speculation as a justification to buy
something the user may never need- any kind of PCI
controller card.

Unlikely to be price competitive to a PCI SATA card now
since there will be little demand for PCI Express PATA cards.

Oh? One would think there isn't a lot of demand for PCI
PATA cards since all boards had them for years, and yet they
are in the market at $15. There is no reason to believe
they won't be price conpetitive as they are not an
inherantly expensive product to make.

That does radically limit your choices tho, particularly
if you want a competitively priced motherboard.

Yes it does, but if you don't buy a board with a fair # of
slots, the functionality of the system may likewise be
radically reduced, especially for some of us here who
already have myriad PCI cards.

And I dont have many cards at all in the newer systems now,
essentially because everything comes standard except for a
gaming class video card and I dont even bother with those,
tho I do add a decent dual head video card to all systems now.

Things come standard but not necessarily with the features
or performance one will want. Many don't buy or upgrade a
system merely to get another few % performance increase on
CPU/etc but they want to raise or at least retain the other
positive system attributes they'd previously enjoyed such as
video capture, high quality (not just paper spec) sound,
eSATA ports.

Not necessarily enough of them tho. If you want two
optical drives, you're stuffed if its only got one IDE port.

.... or you just buy the PCI PATA card as already mentioned,
just not a RAID card if the particular specimen won't
support ATAPI.

Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a PCI SATA
card now, off ebay, from a retail operation that sells on ebay.

Why would you bother with eBay when everyone and their
brother sells low cost SATA cards? Seems like an
unnecessary risk to me, especially when the # of sellers
stocking them is SO great that the purchase can be combined
with some other parts order to reduce if not eliminate the
shipping cost (which would tend to be about 1/4 the cost of
the card).

Unlikely that he'll be happy with just one hard drive and one
optical drive. He's already got more than that in his dinosaur.

If he has these drives already, all the more reason to have
the PATA card in the new system to reuse them.

If he needs MORE drives in the next system, the obvious
choice once he HAS the new system is the SATA as it is then
natively supported.

Makes a lot more sense to cripple the dinosaur,
not the new one and not limit which motherboard
you can use in the new system.


Sure, but its a slow old dinosaur anyway, bet he wont even notice.

Actually for common tasks his system is plenty fast enough
to make the HDDs performance a bottleneck. Once you go over
a few hundred MHz CPU, HDD is the primary bottleneck for web
surfing, email, many office tasks... essentially all the
more common uses of a PC, even loading the OS.

Most people are irrelevant, what matters is what he has in his dinosaur.

His system could end up faster if properly set up than a
brand new one that was crippled to the PCI limits of the Via
chipset and a PCI controller card. That is, at most common
tasks. We could surely come up with some hypothetical use
that stressed the CPU or other subsystem more, but most
common tasks won't.

And if its not the boot drive, I bet he wont even notice that.

If it is only used for supplimental storage and there are no
large files being used, such as video editing, that is
likely true. It's still a waste of money for the SATA card
though.

Not when its not the boot drive.

Maybe. We will have to assume he's installing the drive to
actually use it somehow... so ultimately that use will
dictate whether it's significant.

Yep, its quite feasible.

It's significantly slower... and at additional cost, and
having to add the PCI card. Worst possible solution all
"just in case" he'll want to reuse the drive AND "IF" he
manages to use up all the next systems PATA positions, AND
"IF" there weren't any better PCI Express card alternatives
at this point in the future. So many "IFS" that it becomes
a shot in the dark whether there will ever be a realized
benefit, but already there are clear detractions from the
SATA card.

Sure, but its already a slow old dinosaur, that isnt
going to change with a non boot drive on a PCI card.

Actually it's not so slow for most uses, except the primary
bottleneck- the hard drive.

Its a slow old dinosaur, no news.


Bullshit, they're just mediocre performers.

.... if by mediocre you really mean "the most significant
performance limit to a modern HDD possible" then perhaps so.
Putting a SATA card or ATA133 card on the PCI bus of that
Via chipset will be slower than an ATA66 southbridge
controller in actual use. IF there were some gain in going
the SATA route we could weigh the pros and cons but there is
no actual gain, only a theory that some day in a certain
situation it "might" have the potential to be a gain. That
is such a stretch it isn't even reasonable.

 

[kony]

Kony, my chipset is actually the Via KT266A.

I think Via brought out the 266A chipset because of problems with the
original 266 chipset.

Yes, the primary correction to 266A was that regained
stability at 133MHz/DDR266. The PCI was determined by the
southbridge and was still an issue with 266A, and 333.
Possibly even KT400 but by that point the Via PCI issue was
so well known that nobody really bothered to bench it
anymore.

(1) Does the A chipset suffer the same low PCI throughput which you
mention?
Yes



(2) I already have a PCI controller card for PATA. Would that
indicate to me the sort of performance I would get if I installed a
PCI card for SATA?

Yes, no, and maybe. To get a comparable figure you'd have
to have a PATA drive comparable to the SATA drive you
consider. The newer the drive is, the higher the average
performance and thus the larger the bottleneck from the card
on the PCI bus. Also, a typical synthetic benchmark is not
enough to pinpoint problems, rather than trials more closely
duplicating the actual use of the system. For example, many
with Via chipset boards in the past had sound problems in
addition to the drive throughput reduction but they only
recognized the sound as a "problem" per se because audio has
to be realtime- stuttering is not acceptible... but if the
HDD throughput had a similar reduction in throughput, it was
not perceived.

Do you plan on using BOTH your current PATA card AND the
new SATA card on the same system? This is an even more
significant issue, given you already have a know weak PCI
bus, it may make performance all that much worse for both
the existing PATA card and the speculated SATA card.

 

[kony]

Have you ever been able to get a PC to run with
two PCI cards? If so, what kind were they, i.e.
PATA with SATA, or 2 PATA or 2 SATA, and
what models and brands?

I've had a couple of PATA RAID cards in a i810 box for the
last few years. One was a Silicon Image 0680 chipset
(something or other, generic) and the other Promise
Fasttrack100.

Another system has an identical Silicon Image 0680 based
card (same as can be bought on Newegg/etc) and a Silicon
Image SATA chip that's motherboard integral (so still
sitting on the PCI bus just as same chip on a physical card
would be). Think that box has an A7V600 in it but I don't
recall for certain... it might be nForce2, so many boards
and so little time.

I've also perviously had the above FastTrack card and the
first SI 0680 card in a KT333 board (Asus A7V333 (Deluxe?))
that had it's own Promise ATA133 Lite controller chip
onboard which was subsequently BIOS-modded into a full
Promise FastTrack133.

I don't recall the exact CPU that was in the A7V333 but it
was probably around Athlon 2100. It had lower drive
performance than the still-running i810 based system with
it's Celeron 500 in it. This was with the same drives,
they'd been hooked up to the A7V333 before it was parted out
to reuse the case and then hooked up to the i810 based
system.

 

[kony]

I'm not Kony, but I had a KT266A - it's still in my reserve machine -
and the main improvement over the KT266 was in the memory controller. I
had to patch to cut the poor PCI latency.

That is the best resolution if someone faces the problem, to
try adjusting latency and see if it helps enough. However,
looking forward I wouldn't suggest installing a PCI
controller card with the anticipation of having to try to
resolve problems, instead of using the already present
controller.