A puzzle about S-ATA --- P-ATA

Hi everyone,

I have a decent computer, Intel P4, 2.4Gh, ASUS P4B 533(-E) mother,
1.5GB RAM and 2 Hard Discs in a RAID0 (plus another Hard disc
for saving). I built it in January 2003.

As I start thinking of replacing it with a newer machine,
my question is: Should I consider buying SerialATA Hard discs
as they are not performing much more than good PATA ones?
In fact, I've read much of what's written about SerialATA drives.
I know all the advantages about longer thin cables, temperature etc.

What puzzles me is this: Now it seems we come to the edge between
the dead-end era for PATA and the start-era for SerialATA. If right now
I need to build my new machine, I must make a choice. And...
it seems not worthy to get PATA anymore, but in SerialATA
150Mb/s not a great faster deal now, 300Mb/s are still new, and 600Mb/s
is in the future. If I buy SerialATA 150Mb/s now, it's not evident that
I should switch to SerialATA 300Mb/s or 600Mb/s later... And how many
mothers support SerialATA 150-300...Mb/s ? A puzzle, isn't it?

Thanks for any feedback,

Bad Disciple
"O n e t h i n g I k n o w i s t h a t I k n o w n o t h i n g"

 

One objective of the standards, is to support backward compatibility.
Which means when SATA 600 comes out, it will be expected to work with
300 and 150 disks as well. Any of them is good enough for desktop use.

Note that, one of the things you can du with SATA, is "port multiplexing".
One SATA cable can support many disks, via a port multiplier box. This
product is already available, with a fanout of five. When SATA 600 becomes
available, the fanout can be expanded further. So the speed gain is not
necessarily only to improve single storage device operation, but may also
be used to build better port multiplexers.

http://www.cooldrives.com/cosapomubrso.html

As for how the media rate will become faster, there is this article.
Some day, disks will go faster.

From July 2, 2007...
"Researchers Demonstrate Laser Hard Drives"
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7900

Paul

 

Bad Disciple wrote:

Pretty OT in comp.compression...

PATA makes no sense anymore, intel dropped support for it in their
chipset, and only additional external chips on the motherboard add
support. 150MB/sec is more than a decent HD can deliver, it is no
serious limitation anyhow. Go for SATA.

So long,
Thomas

 

hmm...

I wonder why it is not possible, say, to cram together several technologies.
this would include, say, a fairly large (several GB or more) non-volatile
cache stuck on normal HDs.

so, IO goes first to the cache, and as space is needed, it is forced out to
the platters. for general operation this could be faster, but performance
could be reduced during large write-intensive runs.

potentially the read and write cache could be partly seperated, for example,
to avoid completely flooding the cache (and killing general performance) for
write-intensive runs, ...


maybe a generational scheme for managing the cache (older yet frequently
accessed data having much more "staying power", than newer but less
frequently accessed data).

....

other ideas, mostly related to caching algos, ... but, it is not clear
exactly how much processing flexibility the typical HD has, ...

 

Don't know if this will help but I have a Pentium Dual Core Pentium D with a
WD SATA Raptor Series 10,000 RPM drive.
Works fabulous(of course "netwise" it helps that I have high speed DSL
connection with a download speed of nearly 3.0 mbps).

 

There are two non-volatile cache schemes already available; battery
backed RAM (which can function as either a cache or a hard drive
itself), or flash-based. The latter gained interesting support in
Windows Vista, which claims to be able to use USB connected flash drives
as cache rather than writing to a hard drive. There are also the 40 gig
hard drives made up of entirely flash storage, used primarily to
increase battery life in laptops (they typically offer more random
IOs/second, which is why they can be faster than current generation hard
drives).

Of course flash has a limited number of times you can write to it
(typically thousands of writes), so has latent reliability issues as
compared with hard drive (typically millions of writes).


- Josiah

 

Could you set up[ a driveless PC?, well one with a flash drive that it
could boot off. Wouldn't need to do much else apart from run one prog
and that wouldn't be very taxing?..

 

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/04/toshibas-12-1-inch-dynabook-ss-rx1-11-hours-with-64gb-ssd/

 

Thanks but I intended/meant a conventional desktop version?..

 

Most modern machines can boot off of USB flash drives. There are linux
distributions built specifically for booting off of flash drives, and
you can even get windows XP to boot. There have been various articles
linked on osnews.org and slashdot.org . Use Google.

- Josiah

 

Thanks I'll look it up..

 

Thank you all for the feedback.

It seems we're crossing another doorstep in computing.
Where will this end?... If we take our human example,
the best computer which is our brain is not the fastest...

However, I might have some other questions about
my new setup and I may post them in a new posting.
Thanks again.
BD

 

Here's some more: Stop cross-posting general computer questions in
comp.compression.

 

I had assumed it being built into the drive itself, not as a seperate
facility...

hopefully, it would be non-volatile (like flash). battery backup could be a
problem for write caching in that if the drive were idle for too long, some
of its contents could be lost.

maybe some kind of semi-stable cmos memory (aka: sram) or similar could work
(at least it would get a lot of time out of the battery).


possibly, the memory could be generational, with sram for more volatile
contents (mid-generation read/write caching) and flash for more stable
caching, with the platters used mainly for bulk storage. purely temporary
caching ("first generation") could likely be done using dram. purely
dram+flash is another option (with data needing to be near-static before
being written to flash).

of course, in terms of cost and complexity all this could be impractical
though...

afaik, most modern drives have a fairly small dram-based cache, but this is
a little less useful given it can't be used for holding data "in general"
(in the end, everything has to go out safely to the platters before the next
power-down, and has to be read from them anew the next time they are
accessed).


or something...