I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA II?

[Kpnuts]

Hi all,

I bought a Dell Precision desktop a year or so ago, running Windows XP, with two 500GB hard disks. I'd like to replace the non-system hard disk with a 1TB model.

I have my eye on a good Samsung one, but it's advertised as SATA II.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think the current hard disks in my computer are just SATA.

My question is, is this a problem, or will I be able to use a SATA II hard drive in my machine?

Thanks, any help would be really appreciated!

 

[spinnerlys]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1GB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Yes. SATA 3.0 Gbit/s (also wrongly called SATA II) drives will work with the older SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bus, as SATA 3.0 is backwards compatible.

 

[Kpnuts]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1GB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Thanks very much for the tip! I can buy the hard drive now

 

[little_chris]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1GB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

And why replace it?

If theres a spare drive bay and SATA connector on the motherboard just increase your storage.

 

[noknowes]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Hi all,

I bought a Dell Precision desktop a year or so ago, running Windows XP, with two 500GB hard disks. I'd like to replace the non-system hard disk with a 1TB model.

I have my eye on a good Samsung one, but it's advertised as SATA II.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think the current hard disks in my computer are just SATA.

My question is, is this a problem, or will I be able to use a SATA II hard drive in my machine?

Thanks, any help would be really appreciated!

sata drives are rubbish.they usually run in doc mode and are sold under false advertising.who care if the interface speed is 1 ghz 1.5gz or 3 ghz or a gazillion ghz the heads can only read/write so fast and the actualspeed is only 20 to 50 mhz...it is just a con trick.

 

[Geckothan]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

sata drives are rubbish.they usually run in doc mode and are sold under false advertising.who care if the interface speed is 1 ghz 1.5gz or 3 ghz or a gazillion ghz the heads can only read/write so fast and the actualspeed is only 20 to 50 mhz...it is just a con trick.

If you say so.

Maybe you should look at some benchmarks.

 

[noknowes]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

sata drives are rubbish.they usually run in doc mode and are sold under false advertising.who care if the interface speed is 1 ghz 1.5gz or 3 ghz or a gazillion ghz the heads can only read/write so fast and the actualspeed is only 20 to 50 mhz...it is just a con trick.

If you say so.

Maybe you should look at some benchmarks.

I already have and it is the actual drive read/write that counts.Even pata has 133 mhz which is never achieved.sata sata2 sat3 are just snake oil marketing gimmicks.

 

[Marc]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

sata drives are rubbish.they usually run in doc mode and are sold under false advertising.who care if the interface speed is 1 ghz 1.5gz or 3 ghz or a gazillion ghz the heads can only read/write so fast and the actualspeed is only 20 to 50 mhz...it is just a con trick.

If you say so.

Maybe you should look at some benchmarks.

I already have and it is the actual drive read/write that counts.Even pata has 133 mhz which is never achieved.sata sata2 sat3 are just snake oil marketing gimmicks.

Please please please do some reading.

The main performance factor for a hard disk is the data transfer rate which is measured in Megabits per second and which if you divide the figure by 8 will give you the transfer rate in Megabytes per second.

This is a theoretical maxium transfer rate of the SATA bus and has nothing to do with clock speed what so ever.

But if you want to see mention of clock speed (with SATA-II it's 1bit per cycle there 3000Mhz aka 3Ghz) check out

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6002484.html

Now were you can factor in clock speed is the I/O through the southbridge on the motherboard and through PCI, PCI-X or PCIe.

 

[Amaris]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

sata drives are rubbish.they usually run in doc mode and are sold under false advertising.who care if the interface speed is 1 ghz 1.5gz or 3 ghz or a gazillion ghz the heads can only read/write so fast and the actualspeed is only 20 to 50 mhz...it is just a con trick.

If you say so.

Maybe you should look at some benchmarks.

I already have and it is the actual drive read/write that counts.Even pata has 133 mhz which is never achieved.sata sata2 sat3 are just snake oil marketing gimmicks.

It seems you have made a serious error. I would read Marc's post if I were you to update yourself on the subject.

Anyway, folks, SATA drives do the job and they do it fast. Most people know going into buying hardware that the specs are optimum specs, not average specs. Still, a standard SATA drive is more than enough to get the job done. You get great transfer speeds and large storage space. It's win/win.

J.

 

[GalaxyX]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Well one of the reasons they went back to a Serial style connection was because the old IDE Parallel type was creating too much interference with itself. A fast serial connection is much cleaner, so right there that enhances theoretical throughoutput.

Drives will always be limited by how fast the platters spin however, as this is what determines how fast data is read off it.

 

[Marc]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Well one of the reasons they went back to a Serial style connection was because the old IDE Parallel type was creating too much interference with itself. A fast serial connection is much cleaner, so right there that enhances theoretical throughoutput.

Drives will always be limited by how fast the platters spin however, as this is what determines how fast data is read off it.

Not quiet - it reduces the time for before the data point passes under the read/write head (aka latency) but it doesn't actually impact the read speed in quite the sense you're referring to.

But however it can make a big difference. One of the major reasons why laptops can be as slow as wet week at Xmas is the drive speed. They use the same SATA-II transfer methodology as the desktop drives by they are, in the vast majority of cases 5400rpm and it wasn't so long ago they used 3600rpm drives in laptops. The reasoning being heat an power consumption.

Then at the other end you have SCSI and SAS drives at 10 and 15,000rpm but they run quite hot and draw the power and very much a trade off (speed for capacity). Oh and there's the WD Raptors which are 10,000 RPM drives but with SATA I/F.

The reason for the lower capacity is a reduced number of platters in the drives (drive capacity it a combiantion of data density per side over the number of platter sides - if you have a single platter that has 250GB per side you have a maxium capacity of 500Gb).

But all that is moot if you don't have the bandwidth to squirt the data down - it's better to have wide channel that's under utilised than a narrow channel that's over utilised.

 

[hyzmarca]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

A RAM-based SSD can fully saturate an SATA 1.5Gbits/s line and the one that supports it can give a 3Gbits/s line workout. The only problem is that RAM-based drives are, at the moment, absurdly expensive.

 

[JustAFriend]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Lets face it, most people chase benchmarks when what they're really in is a pee-ing contest.

Unless you're ripping BueRay/HD movies or doing some massive research project on terrabyte databases, you're not gonna notice any difference in the REAL WORLD.

Just get a dependable cheap drive and be done with it.

 

[Marc]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

A RAM-based SSD can fully saturate an SATA 1.5Gbits/s line and the one that supports it can give a 3Gbits/s line workout. The only problem is that RAM-based drives are, at the moment, absurdly expensive.

I think we'll eventually see SSD drive prices drop down to the price of server level 10 & 15K RPM drives but I'm not sure if they'll become commodity for everyday users but the overclockers determined to wring every drop of performance of out their computers, well that's another matter

And lets face it - SSD drives are expensive per GB compared to standard SATA drive but at $12 per GB (figure in the Anandtech article) it's on probably cheaper than standard system ram.

Anandtech ran article a while back on SSD looking a different server configurations you do with combining conventional drives with SSDs in server. For example a database server where the data was stored on the conventional and the transaction logs on the SSDs.

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532&p=0

The next gneration SATA standard (SATA 6Gbit/s) was finalised towards the end of last month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_II#SATA_6_Gbit.2Fs

Going by an article on Slashdot a bit further back it should start to appear on motherboards by the end of this year.

There was also discussion about which is going to be better then SATA standard or USB3 (have to admit I've never been a fan of USB for hard disks - they've always seemed to lack performance but that could just be my perception).

 

[hyzmarca]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

A RAM-based SSD can fully saturate an SATA 1.5Gbits/s line and the one that supports it can give a 3Gbits/s line workout. The only problem is that RAM-based drives are, at the moment, absurdly expensive.

I think we'll eventually see SSD drive prices drop down to the price of server level 10 & 15K RPM drives but I'm not sure if they'll become commodity for everyday users but the overclockers determined to wring every drop of performance of out their computers, well that's another matter

And lets face it - SSD drives are expensive per GB compared to standard SATA drive but at $12 per GB (figure in the Anandtech article) it's on probably cheaper than standard system ram.

Anandtech ran article a while back on SSD looking a different server configurations you do with combining conventional drives with SSDs in server. For example a database server where the data was stored on the conventional and the transaction logs on the SSDs.

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532&p=0

The next gneration SATA standard (SATA 6Gbit/s) was finalised towards the end of last month.

That ariticle is about flash based SSDs, which still have problems with slow random write times, and aren't nearly as fast as RAM based SSDs, of which there is only one currectly on the market, made by a UK company.
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
The only problem with using a RAM based solution, other than volitility (which can be solved with battery power and automatic backup, features that the Hyperdrive 5 include) is that it is substantially more expensive than flash based solutions.

 

[Marc]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

That ariticle is about flash based SSDs, which still have problems with slow random write times, and aren't nearly as fast as RAM based SSDs, of which there is only one currectly on the market, made by a UK company.
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

Thought either ASUS or Gigabyte had a similar unit. Read the review in the past 6 months but can't remember where (think it was Anandtech but the search engine there blows chunks).

One thing I did find was an example of how the price has dropped. In 2007 when some of the early SSDs were revied (and shit I can't believe it was that long ago!!) the price as about $37 per GB - so in 2 years the price has dropped by 2/3s.

 

[hyzmarca]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

That ariticle is about flash based SSDs, which still have problems with slow random write times, and aren't nearly as fast as RAM based SSDs, of which there is only one currectly on the market, made by a UK company.
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

Thought either ASUS or Gigabyte had a similar unit. Read the review in the past 6 months but can't remember where (think it was Anandtech but the search engine there blows chunks).

Gigabyte did, but it's been discontinued and they have no plans to release an updated version. There just wasn't enough demand, I suppose. Right now, HyperOS Systems is the only company offering desktop RAM drives, though others offer RAM drives for networks and server racks. There isn't really much of a market for them outside outside of massive real-time centralized database applications, where latency matters.

 

[romulus]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Is there a difference between "sustained read/write" and "sequential access - read/write"? According to that link you provided, that ram drive has

>Sustained Read Rate of 175 MB/s.
>Sustained Write Rate of 145MB/s.

According to this link this drive has

Sequential Access - Read Up to 260MB/s
Sequential Access - Write Up to 210MB/s

That’s not so impressive for a "ram" drive made from DDR2. According to this DDR2 should have at least 3200 MB/s peak transfer rate. They make it sound impressive by saying it is a "Ram drive," where is the bottleneck? Why is it so much slower than what DDR2 should be capable of?

It almost seem better to get a 64bit processor with a motherboard capable of 24 gigs ram or more and just make a "ram drive" with all that extra ram most apps don’t supposedly need. I know not getting 32bit XP is like asking some people to get punched in the face but if you really wont something fancy sounding like a ram drive there has to be better ways than that drive.

Or am I just not getting something here?

 

[Marc]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1TB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

Is there a difference between "sustained read/write" and "sequential access - read/write"? According to that link you provided, that ram drive has

>Sustained Read Rate of 175 MB/s.
>Sustained Write Rate of 145MB/s.

According to this link this drive has

Sequential Access - Read Up to 260MB/s
Sequential Access - Write Up to 210MB/s

That’s not so impressive for a "ram" drive made from DDR2. According to this DDR2 should have at least 3200 MB/s peak transfer rate. They make it sound impressive by saying it is a "Ram drive," where is the bottleneck? Why is it so much slower than what DDR2 should be capable of?

It almost seem better to get a 64bit processor with a motherboard capable of 24 gigs ram or more and just make a "ram drive" with all that extra ram most apps don’t supposedly need. I know not getting 32bit XP is like asking some people to get punched in the face but if you really wont something fancy sounding like a ram drive there has to be better ways than that drive.

Or am I just not getting something here?

There are several factors which would explain why system ram has such bandwidth.

a) dual channel (not familiar with ram based SSDs to know if they support dual channel operations
b) high speed link to the processor through north bridge
c) memory controller on the processor die (start by Dec on the ALpha then licenced as Hypertransport on the AMD chips. Intel's variation iirc is called QPI).
d) you're going over the SATA interface which is 3Gbit per second or 375Mbytes per second (divide bits by 8 to get bytes) so the memory bandwidth through the system bus is 9 times that of the SATA bus.

There is nothing new about ram disk using system - it's a very old techique (dating back to 1979/80 according to wiki). I can remember Ramdisk on a Kaypro II with 64K of memory and running CP/M. It was quicker to save documents to ramdrive than the floppies.

It was later introduced to MS DOS but I think it's been deprecated from the MS Operating systems for sometime now. Linux does still make use of it as part of the install process.

The problem with system memory based ramdisks was you took memory away from the system in the same way when using onboard graphics on motherboards and b) there was no way to back/protect it. Units like the Hyperdrive have a battery protection and the ability to make backups to a compact flash card.

And to answer your first questions last.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_accesshttp://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/perf/spec/transSTR-c.html

 

[clint g]

Re: I'd like to buy a 1GB hard disk.. difference between SATA and SATA

And why replace it?

If theres a spare drive bay and SATA connector on the motherboard just increase your storage.

If his dell is like every dell I've ever owned (which is a considerable amount) there will only be two drive bays.

One thing I would suggest is that the OP buy an HD enclosure and use that other 500 gig hd as an external