[ANNOUNCEMENT] Wiki for discussing P35/IHC9(R)/SATA issues set up

[Scott Long]

Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:
>> BTW - in a recent test of 2.5" high-capacity HDD, it was noted that
>> SATA required significantly more power than PATA. Well 'significant'
>> to a laptop on battery, anyway.
> 
> Perhaps I am just very unlike the typical user but why on earth have
> unix on a laptop (or even have a laptop for that matter ;-))
>> Easier to maintain data integrity comes to mind as well as power budget.
> 
> On any mobo that can support SATA/300 one would think the bus/cpu could
> keep pace so wheres the issue?

Disk platter speed and density are the primary forces in actual 
interface speed.  The fastest SATA disks I've seen so far do around 
95MB/s, well lower than the 150MB/s that SATA150 can give.  The 
advantage to SATA300 (and SATA600 when/if it comes out) are:

1. faster cache speed for burst transfers
2. better scaling for port multipliers (but most just use SAS for this 
anyways)
3. more profits for drive makers who convince you that faster is
inherently better.

Scott