$#!t$#!t$#!t SATA hard drives!

  • Thread starter Thread starter ChristopherM
  • Start date Start date
Well, the tiny little cables are enough of an advantage for me, since my case is overcrowded. And I found the drive at a great price, around $100 for a 120GB, which was comparable to the price of an ultra ATA.

The power attachment issue is (currently) a non-issue. All the SATA drives I've seen (admittedly, they were all Western Digital drives) include both the standard 4-pin power connector and the new style SATA power connector. And chances are, if you buy a motherboard that supports SATA, it includes at least one adapter that converts from the old 4-pin power connector to the new SATA style power connector (mine came with two).
 
elevate said:
Yeah..it's SATA though - Western Digital Raptor.
Click to expand...
I use one without a hitch. But the downside is its only 30gig max.
 
"It still has to push its data accros the pci bus."

On a modern chipset, this is simply not true unless you're using the ancillary RAID channels provided by most deluxe versions of motherboards (i.e., the SATA channels on an Abit NF7-S or Asus A7N8X Deluxe).

Particularly when it comes to the native SATA channels on a modern P4 platform (i865 or i875 chipset with ICH5/ICH5R Southbridge) these are part of the southbridge and do not traverse a bus even related to PCI. They in fact have unique point-to-point connectivity to the rest of the SB core logic.

Again, though, extra PATA or SATA channels provided by a RAID chipset (Promise, Silicon Image, etc.) are connected to the standard old 33MHz/32-bit PCI bus. This is bad, particularly for home recording users as disk I/O to these drives eats up PCI bandwidth better left for their high-end audio cards.

This brings me to another point regarding motherboard choice for P4 platforms for home recording folks. It is to your advantage to ensure that the motherboard you are buying uses the Intel network chip that connects directly to the Northbridge rather than the unfortunately common BroadCom chipset that must be connected to the PCI bus.
 
Marquis or anybody,

Perhaps you can help me understand the advantages of Firewire (1394) drives for dedicated music storage. The Digidesign Digi 002 for example highly recommends the use of a Firewire drive, and illustrates the drive being directly attached to the Digi 002. My gut interpretation is that regardless of where the Firewire drive is located in the chain/bus there is no performance degradation. Can you comment?
 
The second picture actually shows the 1394 drive connected to the system directly, as I would expect it to. In reality, it's unlikely to make a difference in performance.

As for a choice of Firewire for storage, I can only imagine they are extolling the benefits of what is essentially SCSI (which Firewire is). That is, you will experience significantly lower CPU utilization with Firewire drives than you will with IDE. It's actually a strange happenstance, as external Firewire enclosures universally hold IDE drives inside. Go figure... ;)
 
Well then, to my perception, that kind of begs the question....

Which is better for music storage,

(A) A SATA drive inside your PC on the PCI bus booking along at 10,000 rpm...

... or ...

(B) A Ultra ATA drive in a seperate enclosure via Firewire booking along at 7,200 rpm.

Hmmm?

Also, I was bumping around 8thstreet and came across this 120GB Glyph firewire drive for the bargain cost of ONLY $599.00. But I can get a 120GB Western Digital firewire drive from my provider for $225.00.

Ignorance may not be bliss, but it can sure be damned expensive!!
 
Personally I don't really understand why they highly recommend a firewire drive. It's probably the best solution for a mobile setup with a notebook but when you use the 002 with a ordinary PC, internal drives are definately the way to go.

By the way: Ever since the introduction of DMA modes (years ago) CPU load issues with IDE are, when configured properly, really something of the past.
 
If your motherboard has a SATA connection, that will be faster than a Firewire connection (and BTW, it's not really connected to the PCI bus, unless it's a card plugged into the PCI bus). Firewire is a slower technology all the way around.

400 Mbps for Firewire, vs. 100 MBps for Ata-100, 133 MBps for ATA-133, and 150 MBps for SATA.

*Note that the small "b" (Mbps) means bits, and the large "B" (MBps) means bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. Therefore even today's current ATA-100 spec is twice as fast mathematically as firewire, though there aren't really any drives that actually reach kind of data transfer throughput.

SATA should theoretically be faster. I benchmarked my drives last night and I got much better results from my ATA-100 drive than my SATA drive (more than 4x better). However, I only did a "quick format" on the SATA drive. I'm going to do a full format tonight and redo the benchmark. There's no way the performance should be that bad.
 
"and BTW, it's not really connected to the PCI bus, unless it's a card plugged into the PCI bus)."

It is if it's a RAID controller not provided by the Southbridge (ICH5/ICH5R or VIA's VT8237). That is, the RAID controllers (PATA or SATA) share the same electrical bus as cards plugged into PCI slots.


"SATA should theoretically be faster."

With current hard drives, that's highly unlikely (excepting for the Raptor, but a PATA Raptor would perform equivalently). Go to www.storagereview.com and do a comparison of the WD2500JB (PATA) versus the WD2500JD (SATA). Same drive, same mechanism, mostly the same performance. In fact, the JB proves to be faster under most circumstances probably due to a lack of bridge circuitry adding latency (minute, but detectable). One could also question differences in caching strategies of the firmware. This was a major issue with prerelease Raptors vs. release versions.

However, the next generation of Seagate SATA drives as well as the forthcoming line of Raptors (in both 36GB and 72GB flavors, with quiet FDB motors) will support command queuing. This will definitely make a difference under certain usage patterns.

This makes me wonder about how many I/O streams a typical DAW really has going at any one time. For some users NCQ could prove to be quite beneficial in eeking out the last bit of performance from their workstations.
 
The only reason I'd consider firewire is as a backup drive.
 
It is if it's a RAID controller not provided by the Southbridge (ICH5/ICH5R or VIA's VT8237). That is, the RAID controllers (PATA or SATA) share the same electrical bus as cards plugged into PCI slots.
Click to expand...
I'm assuming that. Mine is connected via ICH5, and I'd assume most motherboards that build in SATA are using the southbridge.
"SATA should theoretically be faster."
With current hard drives, that's highly unlikely (excepting for the Raptor, but a PATA Raptor would perform equivalently).
Click to expand...
As I said, theoretically. In the same message I said "even today's current ATA-100 spec is twice as fast mathematically as firewire, though there aren't really any drives that actually reach that kind of data transfer throughput."
 
I just like to ensure there are no misconceptions, particularly for those users who aren't blessed with equipment as new as yours. In fact, I know of no Athlon XP motherboards whose SATA is provided via the SB. There are some Athlon 64 and Athlon FX boards, though.
 
Yeah, that's a good point. My motherboard also has Promise Raid built in, and that does use the PCI bus. People over on the MSI forums have said their througput with Promise is lower. But I didn't want to deal with the hassle of configuring the Promise BIOS, etc, so I just went with the ICH5 connection. My PATA drive is benchmarking slightly faster than my SATA drive. I think the 160GB PATA drive is just a faster drive than the 120GB SATA drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top