Strange Intel Mobo Behavior

[Juha Saarinen]

On 6/4/07, Tim Daneliuk <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote:
> I get around 50MB/sec or so with about 2G file, so we're in the same
> ballpark.  In round numbers, this is 1/3 the theoretical throughput
> of a SATA-150 or 1/6 that of SATA-300.  Now, I *am* curious on what
> the bottlenecks are.  50MB/sec isn't a whole lot different that what
> I'd expect out of a modern PATA drive.

I'm getting 50-55Mbyte/s as well, on an ICH7-equipped board and
SATA-150 hard drive. Seems to fall within expectations. The maximum
theoretical interface speed isn't the same as what you get from the
device connected to it, unfortunately. It's pretty fast still
considering the price of the hardware, and if you want more, use RAID.

> So, noting the better cabling
> and the wide availability of on-board RAID, it sure looks to me like there
> is no compelling argument to be made for SATA in non-RAIDed environments.
> I'm guessing the drives are the same ones as their PATA counterparts, just
> with different interface electronics, so we're not going to see SCSI-like
> reliability and/or performance under load.

Not entirely correct. SATA is hot-swappable, and you can get drives
with command queuing for improved performance. No master/slave jumper
fiddling either, which is nice. It's a technology not to be spat at,
basically, and it's much cheaper than SCSI.

-- 
Juha
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha