Worth upgrading my HD?

[Bobby]

I'm currently running a 120Gb, Maxtor PATA 133 hard drive with a 8Mb buffer
and I was considering upgrading to a new SATA Diamond Max 10, 250Gb HD with
16Mb buffer.

Will I notice any performance difference or are the improvements so subtle
that it won't make any difference to real world applications?

These drives are branded "SATA 2" drives. What does that mean?

Cheers.

Bobby

 

[John]

I'm currently running a 120Gb, Maxtor PATA 133 hard drive with a 8Mb buffer
and I was considering upgrading to a new SATA Diamond Max 10, 250Gb HD with
16Mb buffer.

Will I notice any performance difference or are the improvements so subtle
that it won't make any difference to real world applications?

These drives are branded "SATA 2" drives. What does that mean?

In the past they would say they didnt find much difference in the SATA
vs PATA comparisons in the real world sicne it gave you higher
theoretical data transfer rates but the mechanical aspects of the HDs
then just didnt take advantage of it.

The sata 2 is a new improved version You have to have a motherboard
with the new SATA2 features too like Nforce4 which I just got.

You know this is a good question since I completely forgot about this
feature and theres new hype that it may be a breakthrough. Id like to
know myself if anyone knows more about it - the NCQ feature with
SATA2.

Heres an excerpt from one site :

NCQ Drives Compared : Maxtor DM10 vs. Seagate 7200.8

Author : Chris Connolly Date : 2/2/2005

Throughout 2004, we’ve seen Serial ATA technology finally move into
the mainstream and wallop Ultra ATA/133 technology into the ground.
While the transition to Serial ATA has gone fairly smoothly, due to
SATA controllers being integrated on every new motherboard and
manufacturers charging almost no price difference between SATA and
PATA based hard drives, we have seen one major feature of Serial ATA
largely overlooked until lately, Native Command Queuing.
Native Command Queuing, easily referred to as NCQ, can be thought of
as a way to make a hard "smarter". A typical hard drive will simply
read and write data based the order in which it receives them and will
fill them out one by one. Native Command Queuing, on the other hand,
allows the hard drive to keep a buffer (or queue) of commands, which
the hard disk can dynamically re-order in order to keep disk seek
times and latencies to a minimum. This allows for faster disk
performance and less strain on the hard drive itself. From personal
experience, NCQ enabled drives to perform visually faster compared to
non-NCQ drives, especially when multi-tasking.

The reason why NCQ has not been a major factor until now is that in
order to utilize it, both the hard drive and the Serial ATA controller
need to support the technology. Many first generation Serial ATA
controllers were simply modified Ultra ATA/133 controller designs with
a new Serial ATA interface, and did not support NCQ technology. This
meant that even if you had purchased a NCQ enabled drive, you still
could not utilize the full functionality of these drives. However,
with two of the industry's largest chipset designers now have NCQ
support in their latest products, spanning across both the Intel
Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon64 platforms, NCQ is finally ready to hit
mainstream.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=ncq300&page=1

Seagate PR for NCQ
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2102,00.html

Im going to look it up this week and see if Anandtech and Toms
Hardware etc have done any reviews on it or any other sites.

 

[John]

I'm currently running a 120Gb, Maxtor PATA 133 hard drive with a 8Mb buffer
and I was considering upgrading to a new SATA Diamond Max 10, 250Gb HD with
16Mb buffer.

Will I notice any performance difference or are the improvements so subtle
that it won't make any difference to real world applications?

These drives are branded "SATA 2" drives. What does that mean?

Cheers.

Bobby

I still dont know whether its worth it but heres some stuff from
Anandtech which may make me want to actually get a SATA drive though
they make it sound like yes there are real world benefits but only if
you are multitasking , running lots of apps at once or something.



http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2094&p=1



Native Command Queuing is a technology that allows the hard drive to
reorder dynamically its requests according to the location of the
requests on a platter. It's like this - say you had to go to the
grocery store and the drug store next to it, the mall and then back to
the grocery store for something else. Doing it in that order would not
make sense; you'd be wasting time and money. You would naturally
re-order your errands to grocery store, grocery store, drug store and
then the mall in order to improve efficiency. Native Command Queuing
does just that for disk accesses.

For most desktop applications, NCQ isn't necessary. Desktop
applications are mostly sequential in nature and exhibit a high degree
of spatial locality. What this means is that most disk accesses for
desktop systems occur around the same basic areas on a platter.
Applications store all of their data around the same location on your
disk as do games, so loading either one doesn't require many random
accesses across the platter - reducing the need for NCQ. Instead, we
see that most desktop applications benefit much more from higher
platter densities (more data stored in the same physical area on a
platter) and larger buffers to improve sequential read/write
performance. This is the reason why Western Digital's 10,000 RPM
Raptor can barely outperform the best 7200 RPM drives today.

Times are changing however, and while a single desktop application may
be sequential in nature, running two different desktop applications
simultaneously changes the dynamics considerably. With Hyper Threading
and multi core processors being the thing of the future, we can expect
desktop hard disk access patterns to begin to slightly resemble those
of servers - with more random accesses. It is with these true
multitasking and multithreading environments that technologies such as
NCQ can improve performance.


-------------



Final Words

With the MaXLine III, Maxtor has given users a good in-between point
for those who want the capacity of a 7200RPM drive, but with the
performance of Western Digital's 10,000RPM Raptor.

Weighing in at 250 or 300GB, a single MaXLine III drive should be more
than enough for any desktop user and finally, such a large capacity
can be had without a performance tradeoff.

The MaXLine III performs just as well as any of the fastest desktop
hard drives available today, but when used with an NCQ-enabling
controller, the performance potential is improved tremendously.
Although we could only show it in one of our three multitasking tests,
NCQ can have some pretty serious performance implications for those
users who are running a lot of applications simultaneously.

The benefits to drive-based command reordering are easy to see on
paper, but the fact that we were able to reproduce those benefits in a
real world benchmark speaks volumes for the technology. As usage
patterns become increasingly multithreaded/multitasking oriented, the
performance impact of NCQ will improve even further.

Kudos to Maxtor for including support for NCQ in their latest drive;
if and when more manufacturers follow suit, it may be time to start
reconsidering Intel's latest chipset platform. While Intel's latest
chipsets don't offer any tangible performance benefits to current
users, the NCQ support alone may be able to convince some to upgrade.

Intel chose wisely when partnering with Maxtor; the MaXLine III should
have been a much larger part of their launch in order to soften the
blow of an otherwise lackluster performing chipset.

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

I'm currently running a 120Gb, Maxtor PATA 133 hard drive with a 8Mb buffer
and I was considering upgrading to a new SATA Diamond Max 10, 250Gb HD with
16Mb buffer.

Will I notice any performance difference or are the improvements so subtle
that it won't make any difference to real world applications?

These drives are branded "SATA 2" drives. What does that mean?

Cheers.

Bobby

The only reason to buy a new disk for a desktop machine is because you
need the space. You won't notice any performance differences between the
two drives, the seek and latency times are about the same which are the
parameters that dominate the actual performance of the drives. The NCQ
feature of SATA-II won't help a desktop system because you aren't likely
to be accessing more than one file at a time. NCQ is a great feature for
file servers because a heavily loaded file server has lots of simultaneous
requests that can be reordered to minimize the head movement between
accesses. On a system doing a single access at a time, which is typical of
desktop machines, there is no opportunity to reorder requests.

Much more importantly, a desktop machine hardly ever accesses it's disk.
If you are seeing a lot of disk activity then you don't have enough RAM.
On systems with lot's of RAM all of your commonly used applications are
going to be cached in the memory system which is thousands of times faster
than any disk could ever be. If you are looking to boost system
performance in a noticeable way the best way to do it is to add RAM.

 

[bebop]

Much more importantly, a desktop machine hardly ever accesses it's disk.

Duh!! unless it happens to be :-
...saving during a large download
...virus checking
...defragging
...playing any recent 3d game
...most kinds of media file playback
+ a bunch of other stuff I can't be bothered to list.

 

[Bobby]

Much more importantly, a desktop machine hardly ever accesses it's disk.

Eh? So what's that red light thing that comes on whenever I load a program
or access a file? Or boot my PC? Or play a video?

In fact, I generally run about six programs at once on my PC (Outlook,
Internet Explorer, music/video, sometimes TV in a window) so my PC
multitasks rather a lot. In fact, Windows is reporting that I'm presently
running 53 processes (in my 750Mb of RAM).

 

[Timothy Daniels]

The only reason to buy a new disk for a desktop machine is because you
need the space. You won't notice any performance differences between the
two drives, the seek and latency times are about the same which are the
parameters that dominate the actual performance of the drives. The NCQ
feature of SATA-II won't help a desktop system because you aren't likely
to be accessing more than one file at a time. NCQ is a great feature for
file servers because a heavily loaded file server has lots of simultaneous
requests that can be reordered to minimize the head movement between
accesses. On a system doing a single access at a time, which is typical of
desktop machines, there is no opportunity to reorder requests.

Much more importantly, a desktop machine hardly ever accesses it's disk.
If you are seeing a lot of disk activity then you don't have enough RAM.
On systems with lot's of RAM all of your commonly used applications are
going to be cached in the memory system which is thousands of times faster
than any disk could ever be. If you are looking to boost system
performance in a noticeable way the best way to do it is to add RAM.

I agree that RAM is most effective. But for lots file I/O (e.g. defrags)
the larger 16MB buffer size in the drive might also be noticeable.
Of course, Maxtor puts NCQ and 16MB buffers in both its S-ATA
and P-ATA DiamondMax 10 hard drives of 250GB and 300GB
capacities. So the only difference between S-ATA and P-ATA is
the difference between 150MBps and 133MBps burst rates of
S-ATA vs. P-ATA.

*TimDaniels*

*TimDaniels*

 

[Rene]

I'm currently running a 120Gb, Maxtor PATA 133 hard drive with a 8Mb
buffer and I was considering upgrading to a new SATA Diamond Max 10, 250Gb
HD with 16Mb buffer.

Will I notice any performance difference or are the improvements so subtle
that it won't make any difference to real world applications?

You won't notice it. I have both types of drives in my computer and there
hardly is a difference. At least not one I notice.
So if You don't need the extra space, don't buy a new drive yet.

Greetings,
Rene

 

[John]

Eh? So what's that red light thing that comes on whenever I load a program
or access a file? Or boot my PC? Or play a video?

In fact, I generally run about six programs at once on my PC (Outlook,
Internet Explorer, music/video, sometimes TV in a window) so my PC
multitasks rather a lot. In fact, Windows is reporting that I'm presently
running 53 processes (in my 750Mb of RAM).

Yeah I wouldnt throw my HD out if I had enough room and get a new one
but Im always upgrading and buying HDs anyway and thats the first
review Ive seen where they actually claimed there was ANY real world
benefit whatsoever so its interesting.

In the review though he says in most things no difference. And even in
the multitasking tests its only far better in ONE test.

Still Ive always been annoyed when I compress newsgroups down with my
newsreader , defrag and do a lot of file copying etc. Certain things
have always bogged my system down one of the reasons I upgraded to the
AMD 64 so if there is ANY improvement in certain areas that annoy me
Ill think about getting it next time I buy a HD though I usually go
for the cheapest PATA deals.

The prices are still wide apart though. Not expensive either way but
PATAs are way cheaper. Example - recent sale the Maxtor mentioned --

PATA $99
SATA -$179