SATA and ATA

[daleok]

Just installed MSI K7N2 Delta. Works great. It has both IDE slots for ATA
HDs and serial for SATA. Can a SATA and an ATA HD coexist together on the
motherboard with the SATA being the primary drive with the OS? Would there
be any performance issues with the ATA as a backup or mirror?

TIA.

 

[Andrew Crook]

I see no problems with running ATA and SATA hard drives in coexistance. Your
cdroms etc would still be on ATA by default anyway. There should be no
performance issues with using your ATA hard disk for backup, obviously it
will be slower than your SATA drives...... it would be quicker than using my
tape drive, however, they're cheap and hold 30Gb each

A peace of guidance I can give you is make sure you get a SATA power
adapter, my motherboard came with the interface cables, however my drive did
not come with a power adapter :-(

I presume that PSU's will soon cater for them.

I will be soon upgrading a friends computer with SATA.. it already has ATA
IDE, SCSI and Ultra160 SCSI.. I urge him to simplify his system (SATA/ATA or
SCSI, all other devices once SCSI are now USB2 eg scanner), I think he
changes his mind with changes in cost.

Andrew

 

[drumguy1384]

I see no problems with running ATA and SATA hard drives in coexistance. Your
cdroms etc would still be on ATA by default anyway. There should be no
performance issues with using your ATA hard disk for backup, obviously it
will be slower than your SATA drives...... it would be quicker than using my
tape drive, however, they're cheap and hold 30Gb each

A peace of guidance I can give you is make sure you get a SATA power
adapter, my motherboard came with the interface cables, however my drive did
not come with a power adapter :-(

I presume that PSU's will soon cater for them.

I will be soon upgrading a friends computer with SATA.. it already has ATA
IDE, SCSI and Ultra160 SCSI.. I urge him to simplify his system (SATA/ATA or
SCSI, all other devices once SCSI are now USB2 eg scanner), I think he
changes his mind with changes in cost.

Andrew

SATA is hardly an "upgrade" at this point in it's evolution. Unless you
consider the new smaller connectors and ease of installation an "upgrade".
Because you will almost certainly see very little if any performance
increase.

The truth is that modern hard drives can still hardly use all the bandwidth
afforded them by the UATA-66 interface (at least 5 years old now, I might
add). Only the highest end drives can benefit from a UATA-100, and UATA-133
is just overkill. SATA, by the way, while being rated at 150MB/s are
restricted to 133 by the PCI bus that it connects to. Therefore SATA is, at
best, a serial version of ATA133.

If I were to choose I would advise your friend to stick with Ultra160 ...
the performance of which is the highest of the given alternatives, though
more expensive.

I would agree, however, that consolidating to one format or another would be
best for simplicity's sake. And SATA is the wave of the future ... though
not quite mature at this point.


Drumguy

 

[drumguy1384]

Perhaps two fast drives on the same channel with a large copy operation from
one to the other would exceed the 66?

Possibly ... but remember, when two drives share one channel only one can
transmit or receive at one time, because they share a cable.

When this operation is done data is cached in system RAM and then dumped
using an alternating pattern. Data read from drive A to RAM, Data written to
drive B from RAM.

I believe Bus Mastering can alleviate this by allowing the drives to
communicate directly, bypassing the RAM cache operation. But even in this
case you have one drive reading and the other writing ... you are still
limited by the read and write speed of the drives, which will not result in
saturating the data bandwidth.

If I'm wrong on any of this someone please correct me ... but I don't think
I am.


Drumguy

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Possibly ... but remember, when two drives share one
channel only one can transmit or receive at one time,
because they share a cable.

When this operation is done data is cached in system
RAM and then dumped using an alternating pattern.
Data read from drive A to RAM, Data written to
drive B from RAM.

I believe Bus Mastering can alleviate this by allowing
the drives to communicate directly, bypassing the RAM
cache operation. But even in this case you have one drive
reading and the other writing ... you are still limited by the
read and write speed of the drives, which will not result in
saturating the data bandwidth.

If I'm wrong on any of this someone please correct me ...
but I don't think I am.

Thanks for the mention of Bus Mastering, DrumGuy!
I would dearly love to have my 2 HDs be able to
transfer images of one to another directly rather than
have to take turns transferring data to and from RAM
somewhere. I googled the term, and I found this great
web page and the one subsequent to it:
<http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/buses/types/pciMastering-c.html>
<http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/buses/types/pciIDEBM-c.html>

Tomorrow I'm going to call Promise Technology and SIIG Tech
to see if their Ultra ATA controller cards include Bus Mastering.
I might even call Dell (if I have the patience). I'll report back.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Walt]

You are right in that when two drives are sharing one cable, only
one can operate at a time. So, any data x'fers between them need to
stored, at least temporarily, by the system.

This is why it is usually better to put the two drives on different
channels. This way, they are on separate cables and can actually
have data directly routed from one device to the other. Well, at
least, under ideal circumstances.

 

[Ed Light]

Looking in device manager, there most certainly is a "VIA Bus Master IDE
Controller" on my kt400 board.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

"Ed Light" reported:

Looking in device manager, there most certainly is
a "VIA Bus Master IDE Controller" on my kt400 board.

The Dell tech rep reports a "2 bus mastering IDE channels
on the PCI bus ATA spec compliant" as well. I haven't
heard back from Promise or SIIG, though. Their reps
didn't know what bus mastering was, so they had to send
an email to their engineers in Taiwan.


*TimDaniels*

 

[drumguy1384]

Well, if you are lucky, you are pulling most, if not all, of your
data out of the 8M+ buffers modern hard drives now contain. With
those, full data rates have some hope of being supported.

Yes, but those buffers, while facilitating slightly higher transfer rates
(under certain sircumstances) must still be replenished by the drive
hardware itself ... ultimately the speed of the physical media is the
bottleneck.

A HDD's buffer, by the way, is used to cache frequently accessed files ...
so that it doesn't have to re-read a file from the drive a thousand times.
This, while improving system performance, will not allow any faster data
transfer from one drive to the next.


Drumguy

 

[drumguy1384]

"Ed Light" reported:


The Dell tech rep reports a "2 bus mastering IDE channels
on the PCI bus ATA spec compliant" as well. I haven't
heard back from Promise or SIIG, though. Their reps
didn't know what bus mastering was, so they had to send
an email to their engineers in Taiwan.


*TimDaniels*

From the article you posted a link to on IDE Bus Mastering:

"Bus Mastering Hard Disk: Normally this means that the drive must be capable
of at least multiword DMA mode 2 transfers. All Ultra ATA hard disks also
support bus mastering."

Also, from that same article:

"Bus mastering IDE will not help at all in the following situations:

* It will not make that 100 MB transfer from C: to D: that you are
sitting and watching go much faster at all.
* It will not speed up DOS games.
* It will not make applications load more quickly (unless you
somehow are loading more than one at a time).
* It will not speed up single applications."

This article, however, was written when Windows 95 was the premiere OS for
the PC (not a true multi-tasking OS) ... it is quite possible that IDE bus
mastering has been improved on in the time since then. However, aside from
higher speeds, IDE drives have not changed much, nor has the PCI bus.

Also, you can rest assured that the Promise and SIIG controllers will do bus
mastering. The UATA spec requires it. That's why Dell reported their
controllers "ATA spec compliant."

In fact, I have a SiS UATA133 RAID controller that would not detect the
drives connected to it at all until I enabled "external PCI controller bus
mastering" in the BIOS.

Hope this can shed some more light.


Drumguy

 

[Timothy Daniels]

From the article you posted a link to on IDE Bus Mastering:

"Bus Mastering Hard Disk: Normally this means that the drive must
be capable of at least multiword DMA mode 2 transfers. All Ultra
ATA hard disks also support bus mastering."

Also, from that same article:

"Bus mastering IDE will not help at all in the following situations:

* It will not make that 100 MB transfer from C: to D: that you are
sitting and watching go much faster at all.
* It will not speed up DOS games.
* It will not make applications load more quickly (unless you
somehow are loading more than one at a time).
* It will not speed up single applications."

This article, however, was written when Windows 95 was the premiere
OS for the PC (not a true multi-tasking OS) ... it is quite possible that
IDE bus mastering has been improved on in the time since then. However,
aside from higher speeds, IDE drives have not changed much, nor has
the PCI bus.

Also, you can rest assured that the Promise and SIIG controllers will
do bus mastering. The UATA spec requires it. That's why Dell reported
their controllers "ATA spec compliant."

In fact, I have a SiS UATA133 RAID controller that would not detect the
drives connected to it at all until I enabled "external PCI controller bus
mastering" in the BIOS.

Hope this can shed some more light.

My 2 hard disks certainly support bus mastering - they're both
Ultra ATA 133 and the same model made by the same manu-
facturer. The Dell chipset and BIOS support bus mastering in
support of ATA 33. And the Promise and SIIG Ultra ATA 133
expansion cards support bus mastering. The OS is WinXP Pro.
It sounds like everything is a go for bus mastering for both the 2
hard drives (attached to the expansion card) and the optical devices
hooked to the legacy ATA 33 bus. It may be insignificant in effect,
but bus mastering caught my attention because I felt it might
compensate for putting both hard drives on the same IDE channel
rather than give each its own dedicated IDE channel in the interest
of fast hard drive-to-hard drive volume imaging. What do you think?
If 2 HDs on the same channel could transfer data directly from one
to the other via bus mastering, might it be faster than HDs on 2
channels
that have to transfer data to and from a RAM buffer on the expansion
card or in main memory in order to transfer data from one to the other?
In other words, given 2 modern HDs in a bus mastering enabled
environment, would HD-to-HD data transfers go faster if they're put
on different channels or on the same channel?


*TimDaniels*

 

[drumguy1384]

My 2 hard disks certainly support bus mastering - they're both
Ultra ATA 133 and the same model made by the same manu-
facturer. The Dell chipset and BIOS support bus mastering in
support of ATA 33. And the Promise and SIIG Ultra ATA 133
expansion cards support bus mastering. The OS is WinXP Pro.
It sounds like everything is a go for bus mastering for both the 2
hard drives (attached to the expansion card) and the optical devices
hooked to the legacy ATA 33 bus. It may be insignificant in effect,
but bus mastering caught my attention because I felt it might
compensate for putting both hard drives on the same IDE channel
rather than give each its own dedicated IDE channel in the interest
of fast hard drive-to-hard drive volume imaging. What do you think?
If 2 HDs on the same channel could transfer data directly from one
to the other via bus mastering, might it be faster than HDs on 2
channels
that have to transfer data to and from a RAM buffer on the expansion
card or in main memory in order to transfer data from one to the other?
In other words, given 2 modern HDs in a bus mastering enabled
environment, would HD-to-HD data transfers go faster if they're put
on different channels or on the same channel?


*TimDaniels*

As I've thought about it, and refreshed my memory I don't really think that
bus mastering will increase the speed of transfer between your drives ...
not as long as they are connected to the same port anyway.

Bus mastering allows a device to take over or "master" the bus (the PCI bus,
that is) if it needs it. This can make things operate more smoothly in a
multi-tasking environment. But you have to remember that you are still
dealing with only one IDE controller port.

Yes, the controller itself can "master" the bus, and because of UATA it can
also do DMA (Direct Memory Access) which means that the drive can dump data
to the memory without troubling the processor, which can also increase
performance.

None of this, however, allows the drives to talk directly to one another and
transfer data completely independently of the rest of the system. They will
still have to use a RAM buffer no matter what.

Using separate ports, however, the controller can simultaneously read from
one drive while writing to the other ... facilitating basically the same
thing as one drive speaking directly to the other. This is why it is
*always* better to have your drives on separate ports. This is the fastest
configuration.

It sounds like you have enough ports to do it this way. Use the two ATA33
ports on the mobo for your optical drives, and give each of your hard drives
a separate port on your PCI controller card. This will work the best ... for
hard drive performance anyway ... your optical drives might possibly benefit
from the increased speed of the add-in card, but probably not.

I also might suggest that you go with round IDE cables ... I run a RAID
array with two 80gig drives, each on their own port (on a RAID expansion
card), as well as a DVD-ROM and CD-RW, each with their own port (on the
mobo). Add in a floppy cable and it gets a little hard for the air to move
around in there because of all the ribbon cables (5 total) obstructing the
air-flow. I lowered both my internal ambient temperature as well as my
processor temperature significantly by switching to round cables.

Drumguy

 

[Rod Speed]

My 2 hard disks certainly support bus mastering - they're both
Ultra ATA 133 and the same model made by the same manu-
facturer. The Dell chipset and BIOS support bus mastering in
support of ATA 33. And the Promise and SIIG Ultra ATA 133
expansion cards support bus mastering. The OS is WinXP Pro.
It sounds like everything is a go for bus mastering for both the 2
hard drives (attached to the expansion card) and the optical devices
hooked to the legacy ATA 33 bus. It may be insignificant in effect,
but bus mastering caught my attention because I felt it might
compensate for putting both hard drives on the same IDE channel
rather than give each its own dedicated IDE channel in the interest
of fast hard drive-to-hard drive volume imaging. What do you think?

That you're getting FAR too anal.

Why dont you actually try the two configs, both on the one
ribbon cable and each on a separate ribbon cable and see
if you get any real improvement in the speed of ops where
you are sitting in front of the PC waiting for it to happen ?

If you do crude image backups much, try that too, but bear in
mind that if you have any sense you wont normally sit around
twiddling your thumbs in front of the PC waiting for the image
creation to happen, so even if you can see a small speedup with
the creation of a compressed image, its completely academic.

If 2 HDs on the same channel could transfer data
directly from one to the other via bus mastering,

You're getting completely confused here too. The
short story is that as long as you have DMA enabled
and in use, thats all that matters with modern hard
drives and motherboards and IDE controller cards.

might it be faster than HDs on 2 channels
that have to transfer data to and from a RAM buffer on the expansion
card or in main memory in order to transfer data from one to the other?

Nope, the problem is the theoretical simultaneous access to
both drives at once. Since both drives on the same ribbon
cable cant be SIMULTANEOUSLY reading on one and
writing on the other, in theory that config will be slower.

In practice apps like Ghost dont actually attempt to
read on one and write on the other literally simultaneously
anyway. They read from one into memory, then write
from memory onto the other when creating an image file.
With quite a bit of time taken to compress the image file.

In other words, given 2 modern HDs in a bus mastering enabled
environment, would HD-to-HD data transfers go faster if they're
put on different channels or on the same channel?

Separate channels will ALWAYS be theoretically faster just
because you can literally simultaneously read off one and
write on the other drive. BUT in practice very few apps actually
do that in practice, so the difference is very theoretical in practice.

And its a rare app that would even benefit from that possibility
in the real world with modern desktop systems anyway. And
what few there are that could theoretically benefit, arent normally
used with the user sitting in front of the PC twiddling his thumbs
waiting for the op to happen with a modern desktop PC.

 

[Ed Light]

what few there are that could theoretically benefit, arent normally
used with the user sitting in front of the PC twiddling his thumbs
waiting for the op to happen with a modern desktop PC.

You just don't love your pc enough to watch! You're not one of us!

 

[Timothy Daniels]

"drumguy1384" crunched the options:>

What exactly do you plan on using the removable drive for?
Because of physical placement issues it's not going to be able
to be slaved to either of the internal drives. It will either have
to go on a port with one of the CD drives or on it's own port
on the expansion card with both of the internal HDDs sharing
the other port. Another option would be to group the CD
drives together and give the removable HDD the free port on
the mobo.

If it's just going to be used for occasional backups (that could
be automated to operate while you're sleeping) it might be a
good idea to put it as master on the same port as your least
used CD drive or put the CD drives together and put it on
it's own port on the mobo, because the slower speed would
not cause an issue. But if performance on that drive is a must
then you might just give it it's own port on the ATA133 card
and group the two internals together. That would cause file
copies between the two internals to slow down, but would
greatly speed up the operation of the removable drive.

Truth is, for optimal transfer between all drives you would
need another expansion card so that each drive could have
it's own channel, but it is unlikely that you would need all of
that performance on all of your drives... at least not enough
to warrant the expense of another expansion card.

It seems a waste to put a modern HDD on an ATA33, but
in this instance it might be satisfactory ... depending on what
the drive is going to be used for.

It just depends on what you want to do with that removable
drive.

OK, here're the intimate details: I do a lot of compiling and
the resulting apps use a lot of runtime support (Java, C#, C++).
There are a lot of file reads and writes. I plan to use one hard
drive for WinXP Pro and the other for Linux, with perhaps a
NickLock for switching between one and the other as the
boot drive. Each drive will use a small partition on the other
for virtual memory (swap file/page file). That is why I want to
put each drive on its own channel. I plan to use the 3rd drive
for periodic backups of the images of the first 2 drives. The
backups don't need to be attended, but I still would like them
to complete quickly as possible.

It looks like I will just have to use one of the 2 Ultra ATA133
channels for the backup drive, putting it in a caddy that will fit
in the empty 5 1/2" bay. I plan to eventually go to an external
backup drive when FireWire 800 drives appear. Promise Tech
has already announced a FireWire 800 PCI expansion card,
and a FireWire 800 external drive should be fast enough for
backups.

The existing legacy IDE channels on the motherboard will
handle the optical and Zip drives. Each of the two optical
drives will be on different channels, one channel shared with
the Zip drive.

At least that's how I *currently* plan to configure the system.



*TimDaniels*

 

[Rod Speed]

You just don't love your pc enough to watch!

Never been into that sort of perverted behaviour myself.

You're not one of us!

Thank 'god' for that.

 

[Ed Light]

Never been into that sort of perverted behaviour myself.


Thank 'god' for that.

Little do you know that the God Of PC's knows you scorn them while they're
crunching massive tasks.

 

[Rod Speed]

Little do you know that the God Of PC's knows you
scorn them while they're crunching massive tasks.

Little do you stupid god botherers
know what that god thinks of you.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

"Rod Speed" purred:>

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to just ensure plenty of
physical ram so you dont use the swap file much at all.

Physical ram will always be MUCH faster than any farting
around you could ever do with controllers and hard drives.

I'm currently maxed out on what Dell says is the max amount
for the system - 384G. I've read from several posters who
say twice the amount will work (768G) if I install the latest
BIOS - which I plan to do.

Pointless bothering.

Pointless anal if they aint attended.

And real backup as opposed to mindless image backup
of the entire drive will speed things up MUCH more too.

Complete waste of time/money.

And get to wear the deficiencys of those massive kludges.

The current firewire is perfectly adequate for that.

A standard firewire external is plenty fast enough for backups.

Mindlessly anal. Wont make a scrap of difference because
optical drives are MUCH slower than the channel bandwidth.

That piece of shit should be filed in
the round filing cabinet under the desk.

Guess you could well do without a vacuum cleaner.
You can just zoom around the floor on your arse instead |-)

Hee, hee. Your sweet nothings are always welcome, Rod.


*TimDaniels*

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

I'm currently maxed out on what Dell says is the max
amount for the system - 384G. I've read from several
posters who say twice the amount will work (768G) if
I install the latest BIOS - which I plan to do.

Then there isnt any point in getting all anal about what drives
are on what controller to purportedly optimise swap file use.