im going insane! serial ata drives dont work with pt??

  • Thread starter Thread starter maskedman72
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That's mighty strange, charger. Might I ask what two drives you're using? I've built several systems with 865 and 875 chipsets (thus ICH5/ICH5R southbridges) both with WD's JB and JD drives and never had a problem with any of the JDs like you say you're having.
 
I've had a similar problem with the SATA implimentation on a Gigabyte 7N400 Pro2 motherboard. Every time the SATA drive was accessed I woud get static noise through my monitors. I narrowed it down to the actual chipset as it worked fine with my IDE drives but gave the same results with a second SATA drive (different make).

Annyone thinking of SATA for audio should just be aware that the leading edge technology is not always as 'safe' as the tried and tested stuff ! - As a rule I normal wait at least 3 months before I purchase new technology.

HM
 
A lot of sata stuff out there is nothing more than standard ata converted to sata in the chip, and then back to ata on the drive. So there can be a bit more latency. But I have a couple of ata drives sitting behind a scsi-ata bridge and even that never gave troubles! And there is more difference between scsi and ata than between sata and ata.

Other thing is that a good sata controller can saturate the pci bus. That may be an other problem. But it has nothing to do with the drives!
 
We definitely need to define the difference between an on-southbridge SATA controller and a third-party chip that's on the M/B. hitmusic, you have the latter. It's a Silicon Image SATA controller that is (electrically) connected to the PCI bus. This could cause all manner of issues with users of high-quality soundcards that generally need the lowest latency and highest bandwidth.

charger and maskedman72 both have Intel 865-chipset boards that use the ICH5, thus their situation is the former. They can't have PCI bus saturation issues (due to the SATA, anyhow), as the SATA controller is not connected to the PCI bus.
 
The SATA is a WD 120 JB. The PATA is a WD 160JB. Both 7200 RPM, 8MB cache. The SATA drive is practically unusable right now for large projects (~24+ tracks). In fact, I'm considering starting over on the system, wiping both drives, reloading WinXP to the SATA drive, and using the PATA as my audio/video drive.
 
You mean 1200JD? All the JB designation drives are PATA. I honestly can't say I've used a 1200JD, but I have built systems with several other JD models. I'm still flabbergasted that you're having serious performance issues.

Still weird, my curiosity makes me want to have at your system to figure out what's causing the issues for you...
 
You can just as good have pci saturation with a controller integrated into the southbridge as a separate on the external pci bus. Inside the southbridge, the controller is just running on an internal pci bus with the same limitations. An external controller may be more suceptible to it as it has to share with more devices, but the pci limitation itself is the same: 130MB/s absolute max.
 
Excerpt from Intel's Datasheet regarding the ICH5 and ICH5R:

"Note that most transactions targeted to the ICH5 first appear on the external PCI bus before being claimed back by the ICH5. The exceptions are I/O cycles involving USB, IDE, SATA, and AC ’97. These transactions complete over the hub interface without appearing on the external PCI bus."


The SATA controller integrated into the ICH5/ICH5R does NOT, under any circumstances, use bandwidth from the external (i.e., what you'd plug a card into) PCI bus. The architecture of the ICH5 is such that the SATA controller is connected point to point with the rest of the ICH5 core logic.

Also, according to the datasheet, the SATA controller uses an entirely different clock domain than PCI. It has a dedicated 100MHz differential clock.

So no, you cannot have PCI saturation with the SATA controller for the ICH5/ICH5R.

I have not read the datasheet for VIA VT8237 southbridge, so I cannot comment on it. But these are the facts for the latest SB from Intel.
 
I'm not sure what the exact model number is on the SATA drive. It's a 120GB WD drive, with an 8MB cache, and it's an OEM model. The 160 GB drive is a WD retail package. I'm tempted to either reload my OS on the SATA drive or add a second PATA drive... they're so damn cheap, ~$90 for 160GB.
 
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