NCQ drive

[terran2k]

right now i have a SATA II Western digital 7200rpm 80gig hard drive, it doesnt have NCQ, its my OS/Data drive. Now I've just got a SATA II 40gig 7200rpm hard drive with NCQ. both have 8MBs of cache. would i see any gain, peformance wise to use the 40gig as my o/s drive? would i see any noticible difference with the NCQ?

[Know Nuttin]

From what I've seen, NCQ doesn't really benefit desktop applications much, if at all, in a positive way.

[K15]

What he said. I wouldn't bother switching. I mean I went from a boot hard drive with 512KB of cache, 5400RPM spindle speed, 20ms access times and 30mb/s transfer rates to an 8MB cache, 7200RPM, 15ms, 65mb/s drive. The difference is staggering. Loading Word XP takes less than 1 second. It took a few seconds on the old drive. Loading windows on the old drive took 1-1.5 minutes. It now takes less than 30 seconds. So what i'm saying is there is VERY little difference between modern drives themselves, there is a HUGE difference between modern drives and 5 year old drives.

[moonlightcheese]

the cache is what you want. my DiamondMax10 has 16MB of it and it offers a nice little boost in access times. it also lends itself well to NCQ but still, NCQ leaves much to be desired. and there is no such thing as a SATA-II drive... SATA-II is the name of an organization that has since changed it's name to SATA-IO to avoid this confusion.

[wizard james]

err..

as far as i know, yes..there is,

sata version 1 , was the older (first) sata drives, sata2 are the 300mbs drives.

[moonlightcheese]

it always saddens me to see this. drive manufacturers are to blame for the misnomer. here is the real info straight from sata-io.org:
The first step toward a better understanding of SATA is to know that SATA II is not the brand name for SATA’s 3Gb/s data transfer rate, but the name of the organization formed to author the SATA specifications. The group has since changed names, to the Serial ATA International Organization, or SATA-IO.
you can read the full article here (http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp). SATA-II is just the name of the organization before it was changed. SATA-II does not mean 3Gb/s. some genius in some company's marketing department decided to use the moniker and there are actually some drives that say "SATA-II" that are in fact 1.5Gb/s drives and this is not false. they conform to the SATA-II standard which can include either 1.5 or 3.0Gbps drives.

[wizard james]

yeah, well theres alot of things that have become like that, and till EVERYONE ELSE says so, then i will stick to saying sata2 and sata, becasue thats what everyone understands

[moonlightcheese]

yeah, well theres alot of things that have become like that, and till EVERYONE ELSE says so, then i will stick to saying sata2 and sata, becasue thats what everyone understands
and i can't really blame you for it. it's a common mistake that everyone has sort of embraced. the only problem is, sometimes you buy a SATA-II drive and get 1.5Gb/s and people get ****ed about it without realizing why. just be careful when using the term and realize that they are not synonimous when purchasing a drive... just wanted to give a heads up to those who don't know ;)

[tom10167]

So what is SATA 300mb called?

[killermiller]

So what is SATA 300mb called?

Apperatently its called "SATA 3Gb/s", but I will stick to SATA 2/II as well.

This reminds me of the WWF.

Me= World Wrestling Federation

Someone else = World Wildlife Foundation (or something)

There was a stink a while back about who had the name first.

[moonlightcheese]

So what is SATA 300mb called?
that is actual data throughput. 3Gbps is the bus speed, 300MB/s is the actual data throughput. SATA uses a type of encoding/compression to ensure that signal is not lost called 8b/10b which will slightly reduce the throughput. the actual formula works out like this:

3000Mhz * 1(bit per clock) * 80% = 300MB/s
(reference clock)*(serial transfer rate, 1 bit per clock)*(encoding for 8b/10b)=(theoretical throughput)

make sense?

[killermiller]

Yup all right here.

Ultra ATA/100
25MHz strobe
x 2 for double data rate clocking
x 16 for bits per edge
/ 8 bits per byte
= 100 Mbytes/sec

SATA 1.5Gb/s
1500MHz embedded clock
x 1 bit per clock
x 80% for 8b10b encoding
/ 8 bits per byte
= 150 Mbytes/sec

SATA 3Gb/s
3000MHz embedded clock
x 1 bit per clock
x 80% for 8b10b encoding
/ 8 bits per byte
= 300 Mbytes/sec


Even that whole site refers to it as SATA 3Gb/s, that is where I got it.

There are going by interface speed not by data transfer rate.

[moonlightcheese]

There are going by interface speed not by data transfer rate.
precisely ^_^

just wanted to dispel this idea that SATA2=3Gbps

it is false. there is no such specification as SATA2. it is SATA-II and SATA-II is an organization, not a standard.