SATA vs IDE/ATA 133-- how much better?

[Jim Owens]

Hi everybody,

It's time for a new computer, and I was thinking of a SATA hard drive
this time around, however... I see that (at least on the motherboards I'm
interested in) the SATA throughput is 150 MB/s.

Not much of a bump over ATA 133 at a glance, but I'm sure there's more
to the story than that. Could anyone clue me in on what additional
advantages the SATA standard brings over IDE drives? Thanks very much.

 

[Bob Willard]

Hi everybody,

It's time for a new computer, and I was thinking of a SATA hard drive
this time around, however... I see that (at least on the motherboards I'm
interested in) the SATA throughput is 150 MB/s.

Not much of a bump over ATA 133 at a glance, but I'm sure there's more
to the story than that. Could anyone clue me in on what additional
advantages the SATA standard brings over IDE drives? Thanks very much.

Since all ATA HDs have STRs of well under 100 MB/s, there is no current
bandwidth advantage of SATA over PATA. That said, the fastest ATA HDs
(the Raptors) happen to have SATA instead of PATA interfaces.

The real advantage of SATA over PATA today is better cabling. Those skinny
SATA cables do not block case airflow as much as wide PATA cables. And, SATA
cables are longer than spec-conforming PATA cables, which matters in large
PC and server cases.

Finally, SATA has a future -- including higher bandwidth -- while PATA is,
IMHO, at its end of life.

 

[willbill]

It's time for a new computer, and I was thinking of a SATA hard drive
this time around, however... I see that (at least on the motherboards I'm
interested in) the SATA throughput is 150 MB/s.

Not much of a bump over ATA 133 at a glance, but I'm sure there's more
to the story than that. Could anyone clue me in on what additional
advantages the SATA standard brings over IDE drives? Thanks very much.

sata has no performance benefit over ide (100/133)

given compatibility issues, you're still far
better off with ide drives

and if the issue is easy backup, you'll find
that dos Ghost works fine with ide drives.
imho, sata is still not ready for prime time
(unless all you do as an OS is 2k or xp, but
if you do Linux, drivers might be an issue
there too (are you doing sata raid? or what?)

check www.newegg.com coz 5 weeks ago they
had oem NSW2003 with dos ghost on it for $20

bill

 

[J. Clarke]

Hi everybody,

It's time for a new computer, and I was thinking of a SATA hard drive
this time around, however... I see that (at least on the motherboards I'm
interested in) the SATA throughput is 150 MB/s.

Not much of a bump over ATA 133 at a glance, but I'm sure there's more
to the story than that. Could anyone clue me in on what additional
advantages the SATA standard brings over IDE drives? Thanks very much.

SATA per se gives no real advantages at this time except longer, thinner
cables and support for hot-swap if the controller allows it (all of them
are supposed to but not all do). The benefit of the higher interface speed
is negligible in the real world--no commercially available drive has a
sustained transfer rate high enough to strain UDMA-100.

The real benefit is drives that are made with SATA interfaces generally
offer a bit more performance than those with PATA interfaces--the 10,000
RPM Western Digital Raptors are available only with SATA interfaces and
some other manufacturers ship their SATA drives with acoustic management
turned off and their PATA drives that are otherwise identical with it
turned on--with it turned on the drive is quieter but slower. Also, the
latest generation of ATA RAID controllers are made for SATA, not PATA, if
you need high performance RAID.

 

[Ron Reaugh]

sata has no performance benefit over ide (100/133)

Except that the fast ATA HD is SATA and that's the WDC Raptor.

given compatibility issues, you're still far
better off with ide drives

Nonsense. There no significant compatibility issues.

and if the issue is easy backup, you'll find
that dos Ghost works fine with ide drives.
imho, sata is still not ready for prime time

Nonsense.

 

[dg]

Jim Owens wrote:
and if the issue is easy backup, you'll find
that dos Ghost works fine with ide drives.
imho, sata is still not ready for prime time

I have used Ghost with SATA drives just fine as well.

--Dan

 

[ahedge]

SATA per se gives no real advantages at this time except longer, thinner
cables and support for hot-swap if the controller allows it (all of them
are supposed to but not all do). The benefit of the higher interface speed
is negligible in the real world--no commercially available drive has a
sustained transfer rate high enough to strain UDMA-100.

The real benefit is drives that are made with SATA interfaces generally
offer a bit more performance than those with PATA interfaces--the 10,000
RPM Western Digital Raptors are available only with SATA interfaces and
some other manufacturers ship their SATA drives with acoustic management
turned off and their PATA drives that are otherwise identical with it
turned on--with it turned on the drive is quieter but slower. Also, the
latest generation of ATA RAID controllers are made for SATA, not PATA, if
you need high performance RAID.

I would add that with SATA you can attach up to 12 drives to a RAID
controller and save CPU cycles on a severe load. Depending on what you plan
to do with your rig, this may or may not be of interest.

Also no more messing with master/slaves jumpers as each drive has its own
cable.

I'll join others in saying that the sentence "SATA is not ready for prime
time" is utter nonsense. Linux will catch up sooner or later.

Anyway, if your main motivation is saving money PATA is cheaper...

Cheers

Art

 

[J. Clarke]

I would add that with SATA you can attach up to 12 drives to a RAID
controller and save CPU cycles on a severe load. Depending on what you
plan to do with your rig, this may or may not be of interest.

Doesn't really have anything to do with SATA--you can attach 12 drives to a
PATA RAID controller too.

Also no more messing with master/slaves jumpers as each drive has its own
cable.

I'll join others in saying that the sentence "SATA is not ready for
prime time" is utter nonsense. Linux will catch up sooner or later.

There are other problems--some of the current generation of chips are not
fully standards-compliant for example. The 2.6 kernel does have SATA
support, but I don't know how complete.

 

[willbill]

I have used Ghost with SATA drives just fine as well.

would you kindly give some details, TIA

e.g. are you talking aobut backing up the whole
drive or only part of it?

and from within DOS or Windows or both?

assuming you mean Windows, which specific
Windows and with what service pack?

if one only has a single large sata hard drive
for Windows 2000 or XP (say 160GB with only
a single NTFS c:\ partition on it), can that
be backed up up OK from within Windows so that
it can replace a failed original sata drive?

bill

 

[dg]

would you kindly give some details, TIA

e.g. are you talking aobut backing up the whole
drive or only part of it?

and from within DOS or Windows or both?

assuming you mean Windows, which specific
Windows and with what service pack?

if one only has a single large sata hard drive
for Windows 2000 or XP (say 160GB with only
a single NTFS c:\ partition on it), can that
be backed up up OK from within Windows so that
it can replace a failed original sata drive?

bill

Sure. On my personal workstation at home I use an Intel D875PBZLK
motherboard with onboard SATA /ICH5R raid. I use 2 raptors in a raid 0
config, formatted to the full capacity, NTFS partition. I use Norton Ghost
2003. I have booted to a ghost floppy using MS-DOS and made a complete disk
backup to another raid array made up of SATA disks. The second array uses a
LSI Megaraid 150-4 controller and 3 WD 250GB SATA disks in a raid 5 config.
It may sound quite complicated, but within ghost you just see a source drive
and a destination-its not confusing at all. I have used it on Dell
Poweredge 2600 servers too, with PERC SCSI raid, no problem.

When you say back up within windows, I don't quite understand. When I try
to do a ghost backup within windows, the computer reboots and starts in a
DOS mode running ghost. Its not like the operation is completed within
windows. And yes, this works too just as well as a boot disk. A program
called Acronis Tru Image will image from within windows and at scheduled
times, ghost can't do that as far as I know. If your 160GB drive has been
backed up to a ghost image, but fails the next day, you can indeed restore
to the last ghost image. You just remove the bad drive and install a fresh
empty drive, boot to a ghost floppy and go through the options to restore an
image to a disk-and choose the fresh drive. Upon the next reboot you will
not even notice a difference between the old drive and your new drive-its
that simple.

I should say that on some SATA equipped machines I have run ghost 2003 on,
you need to disable "SATA enhanced mode" in the BIOS otherwise ghost locks
up while loading. Why this is necessary I don't know, but it doesn't seem
to cause any problems once you are aware of what needs to be done. I would
guess this will be fixed in future releases.

I love ghost, once you know ghost you can make HUGE tasks take only the
slightest amount of effort, like installing 300 new PCs in a library. I
would really like to become a Acronis Truimage expert, it has features that
amaze me.

Let me know if you have any more questions.
--Dan

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

Nonsense. There no significant compatibility issues.

Really? Look up Silicon Image and Seagate's spat over the Mod15Write
bug. Both companies pointing the finger at each other and the user is
in the middle.

 

[heretic]

Hi everybody,

It's time for a new computer, and I was thinking of a SATA hard drive
this time around, however... I see that (at least on the motherboards I'm
interested in) the SATA throughput is 150 MB/s.

Not much of a bump over ATA 133 at a glance, but I'm sure there's more
to the story than that. Could anyone clue me in on what additional
advantages the SATA standard brings over IDE drives? Thanks very much.

SATA drives are mostly ATA drives with an extra chip which converts
the "old" ATA to "new" SATA. Just an extra layer of conversions added
to a simple ATA drive. Lots more to go wrong. But our resident SATA
gurus all had to have them and want you to have one too.

It's an IQ test really, with the usual jar of vaseline on the side

There's a future for SATA when it becomes a more mature technology,
but not for the "ATA with SATA converter chip" drives you'd buy today.

If you're aware of how these standards and toys evolve eg
33,66,100,133,150SATA; I'd wait for the next step before becoming a
beta tester.

Just get a standard Western Digital drive in the size you want.

And don't believe everything they want to sell you.

 

[J. Clarke]

SATA drives are mostly ATA drives with an extra chip which converts
the "old" ATA to "new" SATA. Just an extra layer of conversions added
to a simple ATA drive. Lots more to go wrong. But our resident SATA
gurus all had to have them and want you to have one too.

It's an IQ test really, with the usual jar of vaseline on the side

There's a future for SATA when it becomes a more mature technology,
but not for the "ATA with SATA converter chip" drives you'd buy today.

If you're aware of how these standards and toys evolve eg
33,66,100,133,150SATA; I'd wait for the next step before becoming a
beta tester.

Just get a standard Western Digital drive in the size you want.

So what's the model number for a 10,000 RPM PATA WD drive? And if you're
not going with a Raptor then why a Western Digital instead of something
fast or quiet.

 

[willbill]

"willbill" wrote

Sure. On my personal workstation at home I use an Intel D875PBZLK
motherboard with onboard SATA /ICH5R raid. I use 2 raptors in a raid 0
config, formatted to the full capacity, NTFS partition.

you use a raid 0 as your boot c:\ partition?

with which ver. of Windows?

and which SP?

Raptors aren't that big, so what is your
raid 0, maybe 60 or 80GB in overall size?

I use Norton Ghost 2003.
I have booted to a ghost floppy using MS-DOS

by "MS-DOS" do you mean a boot floppy disk
that is made from Win98? if yes, imho
you'd be better to call that DOS98

and made a complete disk
backup to another raid array made up of SATA disks. The second array uses a
LSI Megaraid 150-4 controller and 3 WD 250GB SATA disks in a raid 5 config.
It may sound quite complicated, but within ghost you just see a source drive
and a destination-its not confusing at all. I have used it on Dell
Poweredge 2600 servers too, with PERC SCSI raid, no problem.

that looks interesting. 500GB in the
2nd raid should give you enough for
several images of your c:\ (on the 1st raid,
with room to spare too

out of curiosity, do you use more than
one NTFS partition for the 2nd raid?

i'm also assuming you run some drivers
in the config.sys and/or autoexec.bat
for DOS-Ghost-2003 to be able to see
both raid arrays? or does DOS-Ghost-2003
somehow hadle this on it's own?

i'm not trying to put you down but have
to ask this:

have you ever restored any of those backups
of your c:\ to a completely different c:\
on different sata disks, and actually been
able to boot up off of the restored c:\
without a hitch???

(say two completely different sata drives that
you've defined in the same way on the same mobo
(i.e. a raid 0 that should be your boot drive
after the restore))

fwiw, i personally prefer to keep my backups either
completely off the machine (as a separate single hard
drive that i've cloned using DOS Ghost via a boot floppy),
or as a zip file (which i've done up to about a 3GB
zip file using DOS Info Zip and DOSLFNBK. but with
these rapidly increasing HD sizes my future zipping
will be limited to my small 2GB c:\ partition

When you say back up within windows, I don't quite understand.

i mean not shutting the GUI OS (which is on c:\)
down while actually doing the backup; and still
being able to create a full image of c:\ that
will work upon restore with a different hard drive

When I try
to do a ghost backup within windows, the computer reboots and starts in a
DOS mode running ghost.

ok, which means it's some flavor of DOS

again, which Windows are you using?

Its not like the operation is completed within windows.

afaik, it's either very hard or even impossible for
a GUI OS to do a full image type backup due to all the
open files on the c:\ partition that you're trying
to backup

And yes, this works too just as well as a boot disk. A program
called Acronis Tru Image will image from within windows and at scheduled
times, ghost can't do that as far as I know.

is this Acronis Tru Image the company that
also provides the "DOS" that gets booted?
and does it's DOS boot process load drivers
for the two raid arrays that you have?

have you been able to get any insight
into exactly what gets run/loaded during
the DOS boot what you do a Windows initiated
DOS backup for your 1st raid array?

If your 160GB drive has been
backed up to a ghost image, but fails the next day, you can indeed restore
to the last ghost image. You just remove the bad drive and install a fresh
empty drive, boot to a ghost floppy and go through the options to restore an
image to a disk-and choose the fresh drive. Upon the next reboot you will
not even notice a difference between the old drive and your new drive-its
that simple.

have you actually ever done a real
restore of your very large home workstation
setup with those 2 large raid hard drive arrays
to be sure that it really can be done?

I should say that on some SATA equipped machines I have run ghost 2003 on,
you need to disable "SATA enhanced mode" in the BIOS otherwise ghost locks
up while loading. Why this is necessary I don't know, but it doesn't seem
to cause any problems once you are aware of what needs to be done. I would
guess this will be fixed in future releases.

that you for that comment, i'll keep it in mind
for the weeks ahead

I love ghost,

ditto.

from what you've said (above), i'm
going to have to load the Windows Ghost
and see what it does

bill

 

[Ron Reaugh]

Really? Look up Silicon Image and Seagate's spat over the Mod15Write
bug. Both companies pointing the finger at each other and the user is
in the middle.

That's from back in March and resolved now.

 

[Ron Reaugh]

SATA drives are mostly ATA drives with an extra chip which converts
the "old" ATA to "new" SATA. Just an extra layer of conversions added
to a simple ATA drive. Lots more to go wrong. But our resident SATA
gurus all had to have them and want you to have one too.

It's an IQ test really, with the usual jar of vaseline on the side

There's a future for SATA when it becomes a more mature technology,
but not for the "ATA with SATA converter chip" drives you'd buy today.

Nonsense. Want today's fastest ATA drive. It's SATA and works just fine.
I use SATA Raptors on high uptime servers with NO problems.

If you're aware of how these standards and toys evolve eg
33,66,100,133,150SATA; I'd wait for the next step before becoming a
beta tester.

Catch up.

 

[dg]

you use a raid 0 as your boot c:\ partition?

with which ver. of Windows?

and which SP?

Raptors aren't that big, so what is your
raid 0, maybe 60 or 80GB in overall size?

Yes, raid 0 on the C:. They are the 74 gb drives so the full NTFS formatted
array is 138.49 GB. XP SP1.

by "MS-DOS" do you mean a boot floppy disk
that is made from Win98? if yes, imho
you'd be better to call that DOS98

When you make a ghost 2003 boot disk you are given the choice: Boot to PC
DOS or MS DOS, I chose MS-DOS. I don't want to confuse anybody by using
terminology that ghost doesn't use, even if "MS-DOS" is really based on a
win98 boot disk, which it was in this case.

that looks interesting. 500GB in the
2nd raid should give you enough for
several images of your c:\ (on the 1st raid,
with room to spare too

Yep, its a lot of space. I was kind of shooting for overkill because I
really hate running out of space and dealing with adding or replacing disks.

out of curiosity, do you use more than
one NTFS partition for the 2nd raid?

Just one partition. I didn't really research that move, but I do like it.

i'm also assuming you run some drivers
in the config.sys and/or autoexec.bat
for DOS-Ghost-2003 to be able to see
both raid arrays? or does DOS-Ghost-2003
somehow hadle this on it's own?

Nothing special, just a standard ghost boot disk.

i'm not trying to put you down but have
to ask this:

have you ever restored any of those backups
of your c:\ to a completely different c:\
on different sata disks, and actually been
able to boot up off of the restored c:\
without a hitch???

No I have not, but I strongly believe it would work just fine because it has
already shown it is capable of both reading and writing to arrays as if they
were just single disks. I have used Ghost explorer and successfully
retrieved data from an image on several occasions.

snip

ok, which means it's some flavor of DOS

again, which Windows are you using?

XP sp1.

afaik, it's either very hard or even impossible for
a GUI OS to do a full image type backup due to all the
open files on the c:\ partition that you're trying
to backup

I am pretty sure acronis tru image does it, I used a demo from them and made
an image. I didn't restore it however, I just wanted to check out the
backup scheduler and get a feel for it. Another amazing tech achievment,
this workstation started with 1 raptor, I added the 2nd raptor a month later
and used Intels software for this board to actually convert 1 disk into a 2
disk raid 0 array-while windows was running!

is this Acronis Tru Image the company that
also provides the "DOS" that gets booted?
and does it's DOS boot process load drivers
for the two raid arrays that you have?

I don't know.

have you been able to get any insight
into exactly what gets run/loaded during
the DOS boot what you do a Windows initiated
DOS backup for your 1st raid array?

For ghost right? Can't remember how, but I think it does something to your
normal boot partition so that it isn't "active" anymore, then boots up
somehow to ghost which must have been put somewhere strategic.

have you actually ever done a real
restore of your very large home workstation
setup with those 2 large raid hard drive arrays
to be sure that it really can be done?

Actually no, but again I am very confident that it would work just fine.
The images made from the arrays are proven good images, I have restored
files from them on several occasions. I have on several occasions replaced
drives on single disk workstations and restored ghost images with no
problems at all. Since the raid hardware makes the arrays appear as single
disks, and has shown to read properly, I think it would work if I needed to
do so. But I understand that without doing it, I am not 100% sure.

--Dan

 

[heretic]

heretic@sata_n.com wrote:

...

So what's the model number for a 10,000 RPM PATA WD drive? And if you're
not going with a Raptor then why a Western Digital instead of something
fast or quiet.

Your vaunted 10k Raptor IS a PATA with a converter chip:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030501/wd360-05.html

"...Hullo! What do we have here then? Upon tilting the drive around
its transverse axis, our attention is drawn to the only chip located
on the underside of the board. This is a Serial ATA Bridge from
Marvel, which is currently used in many places in order to make
products compatible with the UltraATA interface for Serial ATA.

We thus know one thing for sure, namely that the WD360 is not a new
Serial ATA development, but a product that was originally developed on
the basis of an UltraATA interface. And that also means that WD could
follow up with a WD360 and UltraATA/100 interface at any time...."


Ah..., that was, Western Digital could release a pata version anytime
they wanted if I read correctly. But you have to buy one with an
extra layer of conversions added on.

Guess which one would be faster ?



PS does yours still have the jumpers too ?

Yes... that's why it's called heresy

 

[heretic]

Nonsense. Want today's fastest ATA drive. It's SATA and works just fine.
I use SATA Raptors on high uptime servers with NO problems.


Catch up.

Oh, Ron, give it up. The reason Western Digital won't release a
raptor without the marvel converter chip is it would beat the pants
off your precious SATA raptor.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030501/wd360-05.html

Catch up yourself, oh SATA guru.

 

[J. Clarke]

Oh, Ron, give it up. The reason Western Digital won't release a
raptor without the marvel converter chip is it would beat the pants
off your precious SATA raptor.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030501/wd360-05.html

Catch up yourself, oh SATA guru.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see how that article demonstrates that the drive
would offer higher peformance with a PATA interface.