Pete Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 For completeness. The SATA hard drives we ship usually have a larger cache - 8Mb, but you can get 8Mb IDE drives also. Most SATA drives are currently the same internally with different interfaces. SATA specs state 1.5GBs as opposed to 1.33GBs IDE max theoretical transfer rate through the southbridge chipset. MOST hard drives (budget consumer) do not require this much extra bandwidth therefore little performance gains on a like for like comparison. Exceptions are the Raptor (See performance review here) and SATA2 with has a max of 3.00GBs transfer rate. Still prohibatively expensive and very rare. New drives are in development to exploit this and will be much faster than SCSI. Most problems we experienced weren't due to drive failure - but bad cables and loose connectors in shipping. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 Digsy - come over and we'll spec one out, I have a MATX MSI board at the moment. Motherboard RAID rocks, cheapo addon cards are absolute bilge, and using Windows to do any RAID is data suicide. -Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Digsy Posted October 26, 2005 Author Share Posted October 26, 2005 Christ, I think I'm more confoozed than ever now! OK, so what I thikn I've got so far: SATA is slightly better to about the same than ATA/IDE (even if the early ones were a bit flaky) Be careful what kind of RAID controller I get. Avoid softawre RAID. At the end of the day, If I have to get IDE rather than SATA its not the end of the world. Ian - I think I'll take you up on that. Can you remember which MB you have so I can check it out on the MSI site? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 MSI KT6V-LSR Socket A VIA KT600 ATX Er, it doesn't say M-ATX but it's a really small mobo... It's also discontinued. Try: Gigabyte VIA K8M800M Socket 754 MATX Audio / LAN / RAID - £41 With a: AMD Sempron 3000+ S754 256KB Box Inc Fan - £60 It supports RAID mirroring or striping on SATA150 and has network and audio built in Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 AMD Sempron 3000+ S754 256KB Box Inc Fan - £60 Dude - 1st post - Doesn't want AMD. The choice of MicroATX boards with RAID is very limiting. Usualy the larger boards only, but you could get a small PCI card like this http://www.midlandcomputers.com/default.asp?area=prodview&prodid=5433 which is budget but would work ok. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 Oh, sorry, I missed that bit. Women eh? Cuh. What do they know about processors? Apart from food ones Well, that bumps up the price for a crapper chip, nice move. You know you could just built the frickin' thing with an AMD in and she'll never notice...? -Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Digsy Posted October 26, 2005 Author Share Posted October 26, 2005 Oh, sorry, I missed that bit. Women eh? Cuh. What do they know about processors? Apart from food ones PMSL. You can tell her that on Saturday Her logic goes like this: AMD seem to change their socket for every chip upgrade, so a 754 Sempron won't go into a whatever-it-is socket for an Athlon64. Whereas Intel gives you the option to put in a cheap and cheerful Celeron D to start with but you can still upgrade to a Proper P4 in the same socket. It all depends on how long socket styles remain current of course. I bought a socket 478 mobo and 1.7GHz Celeron three years ago (ish) with the idea of doing a similar upgrade and I still have a good range of replacement processor options available. TBH I really think that even a middling spec Intel orAMD chip will be more than sufficient for what she wants. Just for background, AMD's speed index is so you can compare them to Intel, yes? So 2600 is roughy equivalent to 2.6GHz. Its a pain. I think she's going to have to let go of one or two of her requirements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 From my experience you should consider the motherboard, processor, and memory as an all-or-nothing upgrade due to the march of technology. Consider it a bonus if you can upgrade just one or two of the three when it comes to it. If you expect to be able to chop or change any of them independantly after three years you are being unreasonably optimistic... Yes, socket 754 is now an evolutionary dead end but the chip and mobo combo I just posted is a hundred quid ffs I was lucky last week as I just managed to go to a twin-RAID SATA150 mobo that takes an Athlon 64, but still supports my existing memory and phat AGP video card. It'll be great when Parcel Force actually delivers my Guaranteed Saturday Delivery package now it's fucking wednesday. -Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbeh Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 Ah - Raptor?. Like I said earlier up the thread, raptors and SATA2 are different. Raptor is a SCSI based drive anyway. Thats what Im running on my SATA port. No doubt IDE is still good for cheap bulk disks, but I've yet to see one run at 4.5ms seek time with 8 meg cache. I have IDEs in my PC for bulk files, but the SATA for my OS drive, so its nice and fast running windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith C Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 Just a quick word on "fakeraid", the MB still implements hardware RAID (ie the OS doesn't do the mirroring). Well, strictly speaking, it does. It's the OS driver that says it's RAID, and presents to the operating system 'proper' as 1 disk. There really isn't much going on in hardware. It's better than a true software RAID, but it's not really hardware RAID. Firmware RAID is probably the closest description (for example a mobo we had in a range of servers didn't have RAID1 functionality until a BIOS update, at which point it did). And from a personal note, I find recovering from a failed disk (that was part of a RAID 1 volume) was significantly easier with the "hardware" RAID than its "software" counterpart... Jamie Very true, which is another reason I recommended the 3Ware - it's very simple and straightforward to recover from a failed disk, with decent configurability. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith C Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 I think this has just gone over Digsys budget! Really - for home use? nah. Enthusiasts maybe, but not your general plodding user for office applications. Digsys requirements: Cheap failover solution to fit in a small case. Performance not a worry - general home/office usage. (he's got a Celeron in mind!) so budget is limited. IDE boards he's seen will fit his bill. Now stop being so pedantic everyone! I agree, and I prefer not to spend money carelessly, but it was mentioned that data integrity was going to be a must, so I went for a reliable, cost-effective setup (less than £300 including disks [depending on size]) that would be very reliable, plus be easily portable to another computer if required in the future. Silly would be SCSI, but 3Ware for a home office setup? Hell yes. I would happily sacrifice speed for stability. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
suprasport Posted October 26, 2005 Share Posted October 26, 2005 As I said, she has the intention to start keeping business data on the machine in the future so she wants a way of backing up everything robustly and automatically why not partition your hard drive and keep d drive for storage, then if windows does its thing and f@+"s up your saved data will be still safe after even a format and reload on c drive been doing it this way for years never lost anything on 'd' or 'e' drive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith C Posted October 27, 2005 Share Posted October 27, 2005 why not partition your hard drive and keep d drive for storage, then if windows does its thing and f@+"s up your saved data will be still safe after even a format and reload on c drive been doing it this way for years never lost anything on 'd' or 'e' drive Because that way doesn't protect you if the whole disk dies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted October 27, 2005 Share Posted October 27, 2005 Yeah, that's part of the protection. C drive is about 8gb and you have the OS and the throwaway apps like winzip, acrobat reader, etc. Everything else goes on a big fat D drive. That way when Windows inevitably chews up it's own file system you just fdisk the C: drive back to ground level and start again with no data loss (unless Thunderbird decided to store all your emails in some gay c: drive path ) You also store all your app installs and drivers and patches and registration codes and everything on part of the D: drive so that getting Windows back up out of the protozoa stage is faster and easier than rooting through a big pile of dusty and scratched CDs... But as Keith says, if the HD dies then what? Mirrored pair, matey - that protects against HD failure. Slight performance hit but fine for a home machine on SATA150. The only problem you have then is if Windows keys the driver's door of your file system on the D drive as well. The RAID array helpfully replicates the damage So backing up the vital stuff to another machine is a 3rd layer of protection... Probably not an option in Digsy's case but it is in mine and I've got too much irreplacable stuff to chance. -Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted October 28, 2005 Share Posted October 28, 2005 This is where SATA is a benefit and should be used! Brand new 7,200 seagate drives properly implementing Native Command Queing are out performing 10,000 rpm drives. (apparently) http://www.seagatedrives.com/sata3/bell_micro_uk/index.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbeh Posted October 28, 2005 Share Posted October 28, 2005 SATA is just better than IDE period. Whether or not its what you want or justify the cost is another issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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