Are SATA drives actually faster?

[Redbird]

I read on THG that

1. Hard drives aren't fast enough to achieve 150mb/s
2. PCI bus has a limit of 133mb/s

Therefore choosing a SATA over a comparable 7200 PATA is a waste of money, unless a skinny cable really means a lot to you.

Comments?

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Redbird
I read on THG that

1. Hard drives aren't fast enough to achieve 150mb/s
2. PCI bus has a limit of 133mb/s

Therefore choosing a SATA over a comparable 7200 PATA is a waste of money, unless a skinny cable really means a lot to you.

Comments?

Not necessarily. The Intel ICH5 southbridge has the SATA integrated so it can use the north-south bus instead of the badly underpowered PCI Bus. On most systems this is 533MB/s I believe.

And most SATA drives don't perform better, the exception is the Western Digital Raptor drive.

 

[Razorblade]

I've heard just the same, so you may be right... Although, I will go for one of those
...after the price goes down...

 

[LED]

The Raptors a are faster , however most HD's have a PATA convertor (cept Seagate) and the HD's run via the PCI bus (cept Intel's claim) so the fasterness (heh word) comes with the newness in Technology.

Skinny cable means more are flow and freeing up IDE ports...Next gen (SATA 300) will be better and faster which that wouldn't be possible without this 1st Gen. It makes way for faster HD's in the future.

 

[drag]

SATA means more room for growth.

Don't listen to THG. He smokes crack.

PATA sucks, it's outdated fragile and awkward setup with those ribbon cables. Serial cables are much less affected by interference. It's not hat parrellel stuff sucks, it's just that those ribbon cables are just outdated.

Anyways. As it stands right now SATA is NOT faster then PATA harddrives. But there are plenty of reasons to get SATA right now instead of speed. Future HD's will begin to be exclusively sata drives, and the ability to support more devices, the ability to use longer cords, and getting rid of the old master slave relationship were the master is controll of the cable and the slave's performance is reduced are just some of them.

Personally I would still get PATA drives because I am cheap If I had a choice I would choose SATA especially if I was into modding, in another year or so? Definately SATA. Any new motherboard you get it would be a good idea to make sure that it's SATA compatable, so you won't have to buy a extra adapter a 3 years from now when you want to use it for a file server and hook a couple cheap 300-400gig 10,000 SATA harddrives to it.

Anyways the current PCI buss is indeed 33mhz. However when we all get 64bit machines, we can get 66mhz PCI busses and 133mhz PCI-X busses, and enjoy the I/O performance that the current Mac G5's can get by default.

Current PCI = 133MB/s
64bit PCI-X = 1000MB/s

The fastest HD's IDE max out I think at 50-60MB/s. My WDC WD800BB (western digital 80gig 8meg 7200) HD, maxes out at 46 or so MB/s. Which isn't no slouch.


(BTW, not to nitpick, but I get confused on this a lot, too. MB/s = mega bytes per second. Mb/s = mega bits per second. big B = Bytes, little b= bits. SO: 10 MB/s = 80 Mb/s or so.)

 

[Dug]

Seagates SATA drives are faster than the PATA drives.

Head to head at Storage Review

 

[lobadobadingdong]

true sata drives coupled with sata support through the southbridge(non 33Mhz pci) are faster.

 

[adams828]

as of now, in theory yes, in practice, marginally. yes the raptor is faster, but part of it's performance is the 10k rotation speed. personally, i'd say it's worth it to get sata on your mobo if you plan on keeping it for a while (ie until sata drives get much better), but it's probably not worth the price for a raptor drive unless you do a lot of HD intensive stuff

 

[txxxx]

The SATA raptor has no PATA drive to compare it against.
To my knowledge, most SATA drives use a PATA-to-SATA bridge, so the performance gains are negliable.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
true sata drives coupled with sata support through the southbridge(non 33Mhz pci) are faster.

The S-ATA drive in that comparison has 8 MB cache while the P-ATA version only has 2 MB, so it's not a fair comparison.

 

[Dug]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
true sata drives coupled with sata support through the southbridge(non 33Mhz pci) are faster.

The S-ATA drive in that comparison has 8 MB cache while the P-ATA version only has 2 MB, so it's not a fair comparison.

Ok, here's their previous generation drives.
V

 

[drag]

from benchmarks

FrontPage 98 187.7 MB/sec 167.1 MB/sec [/L]

Somehow I don't think this section of the benchmarks is all that accurate.

 

[Dug]

Originally posted by: drag
from benchmarks

FrontPage 98 187.7 MB/sec 167.1 MB/sec [/L]

Somehow I don't think this section of the benchmarks is all that accurate.

This is from winbench 99, The raptor and maxtor scsi score about the same. Cached info.

And wether its accurate or not is why they run other benchmarks. But the faster drives do score higher numbers no matter what those numbers are.

 

[NightCrawler]

I truly hate PATA cables, there a pain in the ass to deal with, I hope SATA conversion is a fast one.

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: Dug
Seagates SATA drives are faster than the PATA drives.

Head to head at Storage Review

That's because they disabled some of the Acoustic Management features on the SATA drives.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: Redbird
I read on THG that

1. Hard drives aren't fast enough to achieve 150mb/s
2. PCI bus has a limit of 133mb/s

Therefore choosing a SATA over a comparable 7200 PATA is a waste of money, unless a skinny cable really means a lot to you.

Comments?

The site is absolutely correct. At this point there is no performance reason to choose a SATA drive over a PATA drive, and unless you really need the smaller cables, the price premium for the SATA versions are definitely not worth paying for. The Raptor is indeed the fastest ATA drive, and is SATA only, but its speed advantage has nothing to do with SATA. If you want the fastest ATA drive, you need to go with SATA because of the Raptor, but if you are choosing between the SATA and PATA versions of the same drive, there is no reason at this point to go with SATA, especially when you factor in the higher cost of the SATA versions.

Winbench has long outlived its usefullness. The lowlevel benchmarks are still the most accurate around, but the highlevel tests are completely worthless and don't in any way reflect real world performance.