SATA II question.

[Jeff]

Post moved from the software forum. What was I thinking. http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/redface.gif http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/doh.gif

So I hear this SATA II standard accesses files at 300 MB/s. Now it won't be anywhere near that, but say for example I've got 2 WD Raptor hard drives in RAID 0. The sequential read/writes of those drives is 107-110 MB/s (according to Sandra 2005). With this new standard, would I have to go out and buy new Raptor hard drives (not going to if I have to), or would I just get a new motherboard which supports the 300 MB/s standard? This is an example, because my next system upgrade will have the SATA III standard in it, which is supposed to go at 600 MB/s.

Anyways, if this is true, then wouldn't my hard drives access at 428-440 MB/s for SATA III? Remember how SATA and IDE didn't reach their full potential. My Seagate drive reads/writes at 30 MB/s.

[DudeMiester]

First of all SATA II is back-wards compatible. If you're HD supports it great, but it doesn't have to. Second, I doubt you'll see major improvement, because with the amount of bandwidth SATA II provides the actual performance of your harddrive is the limiting factor.

[Jeff]

If my hard drive could out run a SCSI drive on some tests, then it certainly could have a chance.

[DudeMiester]

I would doubt it could out-do 2 15k rpm SCSI drives in a RAID 0, and probably couldn't out-do 2 10k rpm drives either. In fact if I recall the high end SCSI specifications give 320Mbit/s bandwidth and has NQC too. That's already above and beyond SATA II, not to mention the significantly higher quality requirements on the actual drives. Although SATA II does have the advantage of smaller, longer and more colourful cables.

[Jeff]

There's also SCSI 160 (MBps). I think that's what the benchmark meant by "beating" SCSI in a few tests.

[Kevin Wolff]

jeffbthomson said:
There's also SCSI 160 (MBps). I think that's what the benchmark meant by "beating" SCSI in a few tests.


Well that's easy, Jeff. I can benchmark my ATA/100 drive against "SCSI" and mean 20MBps "Fast Wide SCSI." I'm sure my IDE will beat teh SCSI! \o/

[Jeff]

There's Ultra 160 SCSI and Ultra 320 SCSI. Ultra 160 has a transfer rate of 160 MB/s theoretically. The Raptor RAID can beat it in a few tests.

[Kevin Wolff]

There's a million SCSIs. Like 10MBps Fast, 20MBps Fast Wide, and a bunch of others that I don't remember from the A+ textbook. Those are old, of course.