Strange Intel Mobo Behavior

[Garrett Cooper]

Juha Saarinen wrote:
> 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.
Yes, there is software overhead to consider, and the speeds are most 
likely burst speeds.

>> 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.
    Agreed. SATA is a nice technology, and the price is right.
-Garrett