What is the fastest SATA drives now?

[Joeteck]

Been looking to upgrade my four 250gig drives in RAID 0, to some more beefier sizes, as I move to 64bit Windows 7... My buddy has four 640gig drive that are smokin fast. However, I'm looking for the fastest or close to it, and put four of them in a RAID 0 config, like my sig. Not interested in SSD or Raptors

Joe

[EarthDog]

That would likely be the Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB drives or the 1TB drives (both Dual platters). You can put those in Matrix Raid and short stroke your OS drive for the best results.

[Mr Alpha]

I believe that might be the new 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black and RE4 drives that just came out. Review over at PC Perspective. (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=775)

[EarthDog]

Good find, though RE4 GP's are enterprise level. Hell that would run him $1200 for those drives! And at that point I would get 2 120GB SSD and a couple of 1TB drives for backup WAY under that cost.

[Mr Alpha]

Yeah, well, availability on the RE4 is also limited. Apparently enterprises are snapping 'em as fast a Western Digital can supply them. But the Caviar Black is only a hairsbreadth slower so I would think they make a good option.

[Joeteck]

Thats what he has 640gig Black WDs.....Hmm... Might be my best bang for my buck... Its not the space I need, rather the speed.


WD1001FALS (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284)


WD6401AALS (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319)


Its just $100 more for all four 1TB drives vs the 640gig drives.

Damn! 3.732TB formatted capacity... vs 2.385.9TB

1.347TB for $100

[EarthDog]

Why are you set against the Raptor's and SSD? Cost? (looking like our conversation about i5 now that you seem to be leaning towards, I wont say I told you so...haha! :))

[Adragontattoo]

Cost is my entire reason for not going to Raptors or SSD.

Then again, my OS drive is a friggin 160 WD sata from umm I dont remember when.

[EarthDog]

Thanks JoeTeck!! ;)

Yeah, I hear you man... Im sure its money. :)

[Neuromancer]

I would not short stroke the OS personally except for a benchmark machine. If you partition it and leave the space, you are spending as much / GB as you would on SSD/Raptors. If you use the other partition as storage than you will be losing the performance advantage whenever you access that partition.

I have done it myself but I usually long stroke it lol Make the OS partition about 2/3rds total size. so you are not losing a ton of space, still gaining perf because the arm only needs to move 50% of the distance it would with full partitions.

[EarthDog]

I see what you are saing Neuro, but the space is there. Short stroke it to w/e your OS needs are and use the rest as storage. Am I missing something here (quite likely)?

[Neuromancer]

Yah my point is using the second partition as storage, the performance benefit will be more than eliminated when accessing the storage partition. (I don't know about you, but I access my storage drives a LOT)

By partitioning it, you have guaranteed that the arm has to move all that way to access the storage data, so you actually get lower system performance than you would if you had just made one full disk size partition. (because the data would not be towards the center of the platter until your HDD is damn near full)

I mention this as I know people that use 13% as the partition size of their raid arrays for maximum performance. But it wastes a ton of space and the $/GB cost is now higher than a good performing SSD costs.

If you have a short stroke setup try running HDtach or ATTO or whatever BM program you like while poking around the files in the second partition. I would suppose that it would kill performance (although Vista/7 might cache things too well, you might actually have to move files around on the second partition in those OSes)

Worth a shot anyway.

If you benchmark though short stroking is definitely a good idea, and you can run a 24/7 OS on the second partition without affecting Bench OS performance :)



EDIT: Look at it like a Video card review. dual partitions will give you higher "maximum FPS" but lower minimum FPS and avg.
You can control your actions in the OS to reduce access of the storage drive, but that is limiting the functionality of windows. JMHO.

[Joeteck]

Why are you set against the Raptor's and SSD? Cost? (looking like our conversation about i5 now that you seem to be leaning towards, I wont say I told you so...haha! :))

Actually, I'm still getting the i7.. I don't want a slower CPU, but that discussion is in a whole other thread.. However, I told YOU so..

The cost of Raptor and size it way too much, period! And if I was to stay under the 2TB limit, why would I move to W7? I want larger disk space, however, I really want it for speed. SO its its either the 640gig or the 1TB, I'm leaning towards the 1TB as of right now... so four 1TB drives on RAID 0, one partition.

[EarthDog]

Joe: I cant afford i5/i7
Me: yes you can, look, here is i5 cost
Joe: I dont want i5 I want i7...
Me: NOW you say that!
Joe: Im buying i7!
Me: *slaps head and smiles*

:)


Anyway back to this thread. What are you using to back up your data on that massive R0 with 4 drives = 4x likely to crap out on you?

[Joeteck]

Joe: I cant afford i5/i7
Me: yes you can, look, here is i5 cost
Joe: I dont want i5 I want i7...
Me: NOW you say that!
Joe: Im buying i7!
Me: *slaps head and smiles*

:)


Anyway back to this thread. What are you using to back up your data on that massive R0 with 4 drives = 4x likely to crap out on you?


Not quit like that, but I did give it some thought about the i5... Besides I found the i7 for $229 at Micro Center.. and for i5 fans $159 for it...

ME: *SLAPS* you upside the head... ;)

Its a gaming rig, I don't care if I lose one drive or the entire computer. Just games get installed on the "G:" drive. The boot will be two 150 gig Raptors I already own, in RAID 0. 300 gig boot, however, I'm going to slice it out and grab the first 80 gig, and make that the boot. Right now I have a single SATA 80gig WD, and works just fine. Look at my avatar... Thats the rig..

[EarthDog]

So you will have 2.4TB of just games in R0. Interesting. Awesome! Enjoy!

[wickedout]

+1 Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB or 2TB!!!!! WD1001FALS

I have one in my rig and love it. It's super fast. Right now HD's are on sale for smoking deals. Just check out Newegg or TigerDirect.

[cw823]

Anyway back to this thread. What are you using to back up your data on that massive R0 with 4 drives = 4x likely to crap out on you?


That's the real question, if you have to have such massive amounts of storage, why would you not have any sort of redundancy?

And short-stroking is still the best setup, provided you set the first partition correctly. Normally I stay at 25Gb for OS and everything else on the 2nd partition. Now if you were to size the initial partition at like 750gb I could see the argument, but not if the first partition has been created correctly.

[mjw21a]

Cost is my entire reason for not going to Raptors or SSD.

Then again, my OS drive is a friggin 160 WD sata from umm I dont remember when.

Techware Labs have a rather good article on turning some Seagate Barracuda's into drives which outperm the Veloceraptors, and at just a fraction of the cost.

See here: http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

I hope this is of some help getting performance on a budget. According to the article it actually outperforms the Veloceraptor, and by a fair margin too. Heck, if I wasn't willing to shell out for an SSD this would have been my choice however I like silent computing and a figured nothing could be as quiet as an SSD.

[hitokiri_808]

Techware Labs have a rather good article on turning some Seagate Barracuda's into drives which outperm the Veloceraptors, and at just a fraction of the cost.

See here: http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

I hope this is of some help getting performance on a budget. According to the article it actually outperforms the Veloceraptor, and by a fair margin too. Heck, if I wasn't willing to shell out for an SSD this would have been my choice however I like silent computing and a figured nothing could be as quiet as an SSD.

You can do the exact same thing by creating a partition at the start of the disk, and leave the rest unformatted. Only thing is, you won't see the benefit in benchmarks like HD Tune/Tach because they bench the entire drive.

Seek times were still better on the Raptors.

[mjw21a]

You can do the exact same thing my just creating a partition at the start of the disk, and leave the rest unformatted. Only thing is, you won't see the benefit in benchmarks like HD Tune/Tach because they bench the entire drive.

Seek times were still better on the Raptors.

Still, I figure its an option for those who want performance on a budget.

[EarthDog]

That's the real question, if you have to have such massive amounts of storage, why would you not have any sort of redundancy?

And short-stroking is still the best setup, provided you set the first partition correctly. Normally I stay at 25Gb for OS and everything else on the 2nd partition. Now if you were to size the initial partition at like 750gb I could see the argument, but not if the first partition has been created correctly.He said it doesnt matter if he loses it. Nor does he need the space. :confused: :bang head

Techware Labs have a rather good article on turning some Seagate Barracuda's into drives which outperm the Veloceraptors, and at just a fraction of the cost.

See here: http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

I hope this is of some help getting performance on a budget. According to the article it actually outperforms the Veloceraptor, and by a fair margin too. Heck, if I wasn't willing to shell out for an SSD this would have been my choice however I like silent computing and a figured nothing could be as quiet as an SSD.Thats what we were talking about already (short stroking)

[Joeteck]

That's the real question, if you have to have such massive amounts of storage, why would you not have any sort of redundancy?

And short-stroking is still the best setup, provided you set the first partition correctly. Normally I stay at 25Gb for OS and everything else on the 2nd partition. Now if you were to size the initial partition at like 750gb I could see the argument, but not if the first partition has been created correctly.


Are you saying if I made five 750gig partitions (4 x 1TB), I would see a huge performance increase rather than one large partition?

Correct earthdog... I dont need the space at all... All my games installed is about 200 gig, I'm just looking for raw speed! Game load times are incredible with my current 250 x 4 setup. The seagates I have are single platter drives...

[EarthDog]

Read that article for details... ;)

Basically what that article did was to short stroke the drives to make the first partition 300GB. That decreases seek times as it is at the begining of the drive. Then it doesnt matter what happens after that initial partition frankly. If your mobo can do Matrix Raid, you can even get the speed you need on the first partition (R0) and then go R1 on the remainder of the space for your redundency.

[mjw21a]

Read that article for details... ;)

Basically what that article did was to short stroke the drives to make the first partition 300GB. That decreases seek times as it is at the begining of the drive. Then it doesnt matter what happens after that initial partition frankly. If your mobo can do Matrix Raid, you can even get the speed you need on the first partition (R0) and then go R1 on the remainder of the space for your redundency.

So, the article isn't complete BS then?

[EarthDog]

LOL, No!

[Joeteck]

Read that article for details... ;)

Basically what that article did was to short stroke the drives to make the first partition 300GB. That decreases seek times as it is at the begining of the drive. Then it doesnt matter what happens after that initial partition frankly. If your mobo can do Matrix Raid, you can even get the speed you need on the first partition (R0) and then go R1 on the remainder of the space for your redundency.

So the larger the R0 array I go, the larger the slice I can make....correct?

EDIT: from that article, the other space is not usable AT ALL. Taking a 1.5TB drive and changing it to be a 300gig drive...

[EarthDog]

Not sure honestly. I would just keep it at 300GB since you only have 200GB of data that allows for 50% more growth and make the rest R1 or just another R0 partition for storage.

[cw823]

So the larger the R0 array I go, the larger the slice I can make....correct?

EDIT: from that article, the other space is not usable AT ALL. Taking a 1.5TB drive and changing it to be a 300gig drive...

If you had two 1.5TB drives, you could create a 600Gb RAID0 and accomplish the exact same thing, BUT, using Matrix Raid, you could then do a RAID1 (redunancy) with the remainder of the drive.

[jason4207]

4x1TB Blacks in Matrix RAID

Example:

300GB RAID0 (75GB slice from each drive) Super-fast for OS/Programs
RAID10 the rest for data/backup = 1.85TB of usable redundant space that is also pretty quick (as fast as 2 drives in RAID0)

You can do regular back-ups of your 300GB RAID0 partition to the large RAID10 array. That way if the RAID0 fails you can most likely still recover pretty easily and quickly. The RAID10 has some redundancy, so the chances of complete failure are much lower, but ideally you should still have some kind of off-site back-up.

[Joeteck]

4x1TB Blacks in Matrix RAID

Example:

300GB RAID0 (75GB slice from each drive) Super-fast for OS/Programs
RAID10 the rest for data/backup = 1.85TB of usable redundant space that is also pretty quick (as fast as 2 drives in RAID0)

You can do regular back-ups of your 300GB RAID0 partition to the large RAID10 array. That way if the RAID0 fails you can most likely still recover pretty easily and quickly. The RAID10 has some redundancy, so the chances of complete failure are much lower, but ideally you should still have some kind of off-site back-up.


lol, I'm not booting off of this array... This array is strictly for game installs... The boot will be two 150gig Raptors...Which I already own, but are not in use, and these will be in RAID 0 as well... folks, redundancy is not my goal here.... speed is..

I have many machines, and this system is dedicated to playing games only... It is only turned on for that reason...

[EarthDog]

I would like to ask a question though... Your time isnt worth backing up your OS and game installs so you just write an image back after your 4x likely (game R0 install) and 2x likely (OS R0 install) R0 arrays bomb on you? That has to be several hours worth of work to reinstall, patch, DL/install custom maps, and when backed up its a couple hour restore.

[Joeteck]

To each their own. :bang head :screwy: :beer: :santa2:

I would like to ask a question though... Your time isnt worth backing up your OS and game installs so you just write an image back after your 4x likely (game R0 install) and 2x likely (OS R0 install) R0 arrays bomb on you? That has to be several hours worth of work to reinstall, patch, DL/install custom maps, and when backed up its a couple hour restore.


Yes, I have this. I use Acronis backup. So there is no need for redundancy at the RAID level... for me...

I know it may be confusing for many of you, but this has worked for me ten fold, and I'm never going back to a single drive for any gaming rig... ever.

[Ashura]

Never say never. ;)

If speed is your goal than you're definitely going to eventually get an SSD, and whatever speed boost you receive by RAIDing two mechanical drives is completely crushed by the speed boost from an SSD. In that instance, a single drive at the right capacity and price point will certainly meet your needs. When that'll happen I can't say but I think it'll definitely happen.

[EarthDog]

Yes, I have this. I use Acronis backup. So there is no need for redundancy at the RAID level... for me...

I know it may be confusing for many of you, but this has worked for me ten fold, and I'm never going back to a single drive for any gaming rig... ever.Maybe Im missing something... if you l lose that image in your raid array, you cant restore from it.

[Joeteck]

Maybe Im missing something... if you l lose that image in your raid array, you cant restore from it.

I'm not a ding-bat.... I'm not going to store the image file on the RAID array.... Thats what USB externals are for..... Jeez...


SSD's need to come down dramatically. The price per gig for mechanical is a much better bang for anyones buck.

Ashura (http://www.ocforums.com/member.php?u=35976), Your comment about getting an SSD, is well funny... Of course one way or another your going to upgrade your AMD to intel, not sure when, but you will... because an E5200 will CRUSH that AMD 240... When that will happen I can't say, but it will happen. LOL...


SSD technology is not there yet.. many drives have a long pause between reads and writes, however is not the case with mechanical drives...

[EarthDog]

Wow.

That is all.

:)

[jason4207]

lol, I'm not booting off of this array... This array is strictly for game installs... The boot will be two 150gig Raptors...Which I already own, but are not in use, and these will be in RAID 0 as well... folks, redundancy is not my goal here.... speed is..

I have many machines, and this system is dedicated to playing games only... It is only turned on for that reason...

OK...then just change it to 300GB for games...it was just an example.

It's just that you've got so much left over wasted space. I guess I just don't understand why you want to spend ~$350-400 on 4 1TB drives, and only use ~200GB of it when you can get 1 or 2 SSD(s) for a similar price that fit your storage space requirements, and are faster, quieter, smaller, and will use a lot less power. You're gonna have 6 HDDs spinning constantly in there!

[Ashura]

Joeteck: My comment was less about getting an SSD now and more about your line about never having a single drive for gaming:

I'm never going back to a single drive for any gaming rig... ever.

You stated earlier that your only reason for using multiple drives in RAID0 is speed. Once SSDs reach the right price point, there'll be no real gaming speed advantage with having them in RAID0 vs one large, single SSD. Hence, my never say never with wink comment. :)

Not sure what you mean by long pause between reads and writes though, what are you referring to exactly?

Of course one way or another your going to upgrade your AMD to intel, not sure when, but you will... because an E5200 will CRUSH that AMD 240... When that will happen I can't say, but it will happen.

An E5200 would overkill for a file server. Heck, the 240 is already overkill and the only reason I have it is because the server doubles as an occasional gaming box. If anything, I'll probably downgrade it one day while building a separate dedicated gaming rig. :p

[jason4207]

An E5200 would overkill for a file server.

Looks at sig...:bang head

My logic was this: The E5200 is the cheapest 45nm chip, and I was looking for low power consumption. I had an idea, and it worked beautifully! I underclocked and undervolted the E5200, and it runs flawlessly at 333x6 2GHz @ 0.856v. I also got a P43 board b/c the chipset on there uses the smallest process as well...65nm.

vNB 1.1v
VTT 1.1v
vcore 0.856v
vRAM 1.8v

52W at idle w/ the disks spun-down!


If I can get the VM running on unRAID I'll be better able to take advantage of the untapped potential in the unRAID box, but as-is I'm hoping the lower power bill will make up for any difference in price I could have saved by going w/ a cheaper solution (but it's hard to beat a $60 mobo, and a $60 CPU).

Sorry for OT Joe!!!

Back on topic...the 500GB/platter drives should be theoretically the fastest. Is there a single platter 500GB drive?

[Joeteck]

Looks at sig...:bang head

My logic was this: The E5200 is the cheapest 45nm chip, and I was looking for low power consumption. I had an idea, and it worked beautifully! I underclocked and undervolted the E5200, and it runs flawlessly at 333x6 2GHz @ 0.856v. I also got a P43 board b/c the chipset on there uses the smallest process as well...65nm.

vNB 1.1v
VTT 1.1v
vcore 0.856v
vRAM 1.8v

52W at idle w/ the disks spun-down!


If I can get the VM running on unRAID I'll be better able to take advantage of the untapped potential in the unRAID box, but as-is I'm hoping the lower power bill will make up for any difference in price I could have saved by going w/ a cheaper solution (but it's hard to beat a $60 mobo, and a $60 CPU).

Sorry for OT Joe!!!

Back on topic...the 500GB/platter drives should be theoretically the fastest. Is there a single platter 500GB drive?

NP lol, Jason

I current have single platter 250gig drives... Single 500gigers would be nice....too.

[mjw21a]

Cool, thanks Earthdog..... I was pretty much convinced by those dissing the article.

[Joeteck]

Cool, thanks Earthdog..... I was pretty much convinced by those dissing the article.


I think you guys did not read the entire article (http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/) or you did not understand it 100%.

The article is telling you how to convert your 1.5TB drive to a 300gig... Losing the remainder of the drive (1.098TB), and you'll never see it again, unless you change them back...

By changing the LBA on the drive with the special software (seatools), you'll be getting the fastest part of the 1.5TB drive. Hence, making it like a 300gig Raptor, for less money...

Cut and paste from article

After you set the size less than the maximum capacity, the remaining space will be invisible to the system and thus rendered useless. (If you downsize the 1500 GB drive to 300 GB, the other 1200 GB would be invisible) The drive will effectively become 300 GB in size.
Now I can hear you all screaming “What happened to 1.2TB worth of my drive space?” As I mentioned the drive is now a 300GB drive for all purposes. Look at it this way, the 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor is approximately ~$229 while the price of the Seagate 1.5TB drive is approximately ~$119 at the time of this writing. Now what you end up with is a drive that is higher in performance (http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/#) in all regards except seek times at a lower cost per GB. We are all about getting more for less around here. The added benefit is that you can always go back and reclaim that 1.2TB at any time, try to expand the Velociraptor at a later date (good luck).

[EarthDog]

No, we (well at least I) , read it. They simply just didnt use the remaining space on the HDDs. All they need to do is format the space and run with it and it would have been just as fast. It was just one example of how it could be done (and a stupid example at that). What we have been saying with Matrix raid and such would let you use the entire drive.

[Joeteck]

No, we (well at least I) , read it. They simply just didnt use the remaining space on the HDDs. All they need to do is format the space and run with it and it would have been just as fast. It was just one example of how it could be done (and a stupid example at that). What we have been saying with Matrix raid and such would let you use the entire drive.


no.... You can use the remaining, because its not there... It has been changed to a 300gig drive.. from a 1.5TB drive....

LOL....

Im aware of matrix raid... I'm using it....

All I asked was which drives are the fastest.... Not how am I going to back up my data. I don't give a crap about my freakin data! Its a gaming rig.

[Shiggity]

New Seagate Barracuda unveiled today.

-SATA III 6Gbps compadible

-2TB | 64MB cache | 4 platters

-7200RPM

New enterprise drives that are SATA III compliant are also coming out with some impressive speeds. (Interesting sidenote is that a lot of HDD makers are moving to 2.5" standards to save on power consumption without losing any speed, 3.5" is quite possibly dying.)

Here's another interesting tidbit from Seagate.

The latest version of Seagate's SeaTools software allows for short-stroking, in which data is stored only on the other tracks of the drive, allowing greater access speed at a reduction in capacity. The company (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16289#) claims that a short-stroked Barracuda XT using 1TB of storage will be able to compete with a 10k RPM Velociraptor drive from competitor Western Digital (http://www.dailytech.com/Western+Digital+Updates+Green+Lineup+to+2TB/article13930.htm).

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16289

But the SATA III SSD's promise to be much sexier. I haven't seen many of those yet. (But I heard they're already doing 128 and 256MB cache's)

[EarthDog]

I saw that. Unbelieveable isnt it? SataII bandwidth isnt saturated yet by a few mechanical HDD's....

[Joeteck]

New Seagate Barracuda unveiled today.

-SATA III 6Gbps compadible

-2TB | 64MB cache | 4 platters

-7200RPM

New enterprise drives that are SATA III compliant are also coming out with some impressive speeds. (Interesting sidenote is that a lot of HDD makers are moving to 2.5" standards to save on power consumption without losing any speed, 3.5" is quite possibly dying.)

Here's another interesting tidbit from Seagate.



http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16289


But the SATA III SSD's promise to be much sexier. I haven't seen many of those yet. (But I heard they're already doing 128 and 256MB cache's)


THANKS FOR THE POST!

Now that's a reply I was looking for!

[EarthDog]

no.... You can use the remaining, because its not there... It has been changed to a 300gig drive.. from a 1.5TB drive....Yes, yes you can use the remaining. Its just a poorly worded article. Its simply short stroking and not allocating the remainder of the drive. :beer:

We have moved beyond your non best practices backups several posts ago Joe...drop it already and move on like the rest of us. We are all just trying to help. :)

[jason4207]

4 of those 2TB drives is going to run about $800. If you short-stroke them to only get 200-300GB of usable space for games you would be getting less performance and spending more vs a pair of good SSDs in RAID0.

Do as you wish, though. You might have plans for the drives as storage later, and for that the 2TB drives would be ideal. If there was a single-platter 500GB drive w/ the same stats I would think that would be ideal for your situation.

[Joeteck]

Hmmm.... So from all this data, we need to do RAID 10 and with 6 or 8 drives, being either 500gig, 1TB or 1.5TB. Taking the fastest part of all three or four for the boot partition and the remainder for the data... and have speed and redundancy too..

Very doable.

[Joeteck]

Yes, yes you can use the remaining. Its just a poorly worded article. Its simply short stroking and not allocating the remainder of the drive. :beer:

We have moved beyond your non best practices backups several posts ago Joe...drop it already and move on like the rest of us. We are all just trying to help. :)


No, you need to re-read the article... Thats not what it said its doing... But what ever... at least I understand it. ;)

[EarthDog]

Sorry Joe, you are correct. :)

Matrix Raid or Short stroking does the same darn thing though so I dont understand why they would do that. I will reread it again to see if there is some reason I missed.

[mjw21a]

The article seemed to make sense to me, but I've never really heard of this short stroking business....

[Joeteck]

The article seemed to make sense to me, but I've never really heard of this short stroking business....


For a hard drive to work fast, its need to read data off the disk. The inside edge of the platters is the fastest part of the drive, since the distance is shorter than the middle or outer edge of the platter, plus and the latency would be the fastest. So, partitioning the drive(s), in a RAID 0 configuration, while using only the first 80gig of each drive, you're making a VERY fast bootable partition. Or short stroking

[White_Pawn]

seagate barracuda XT. Claims to hit 6gbps. Which isn't even supported on most mobos. lol

http://www.dailytech.com/Seagate+Ships+First+6+Gbps+SATA+Drive+to+Channel/article16289.htm

[EarthDog]

6gbps is the sata III standard. It wont even come close to saturating sata II bandwidth as it said sustatined transfers of 140mbps.

[Neuromancer]

6gbps is the sata III standard. It wont even come close to saturating sata II bandwidth as it said sustatined transfers of 140mbps.

Would come close to maxing the original SATA standard though :)

[Joeteck]

We will not see mobos with this feature until 2010 some time..

[EarthDog]

or now.....I thought some P55 boards are shipping with sata III? Like the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5...

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5954&Itemid=47

[Joeteck]

or now.....I thought some P55 boards are shipping with sata III? Like the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5...

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5954&Itemid=47


Can you buy those boards right now? no... There is no rush for it, because there hard drives out with it.... again, 2010 sometime...

[EarthDog]

Can you buy those boards right now? no... There is no rush for it, because there hard drives out with it.... again, 2010 sometime...

I'll go to newegg and check for you...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128402&Tpk=Gigabyte%20GA-P55-UD5


http://www.tweaktown.com/news/12282/early_look_at_gigabyte_p55_ud5_and_ud4p_mobos/index.html

[Joeteck]

I'll go to newegg and check for you...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128402&Tpk=Gigabyte%20GA-P55-UD5 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128402&Tpk=Gigabyte%20GA-P55-UD5)


http://www.tweaktown.com/news/12282/early_look_at_gigabyte_p55_ud5_and_ud4p_mobos/index.html


Thats not the same board, silly.... :screwy:

QUOTE:

So far the GA-EP55-UD5 and GA-EP55-UD4P will include it as well as the revamped GA-EX58A-Extreme, which we will talk about more later. Possibly others will also include it, but we don't have the full details at this stage.

[EarthDog]

Thats not the same board, silly.... :screwy:

QUOTE:

So far the GA-EP55-UD5 and GA-EP55-UD4P will include it as well as the revamped GA-EX58A-Extreme, which we will talk about more later. Possibly others will also include it, but we don't have the full details at this stage.Click the second link please! That board is the same one mentioned in the article.

[EarthDog]

ya know... it seems like that article I clicked may have dropped the "E" portion you are talking about in the name. As I clicked on the newegg link, the board I showed only has sata 2 while the board in teh picture shows sata 3.

[Joeteck]

Click the second link please........

The website does not even have the EP55


Right from gigabyte own site:

Intel® P55 Express Chipset:

6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2_0, SATA2_1, SATA2_2, SATA2_3, SATA2_4, SATA2_5) supporting up to 6 SATA 3Gb/s devices
Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10

GIGABYTE SATA2 chip:

1 x IDE connector supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 and up to 2 IDE devices
2 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GSATA2_0, GSATA2_1) supporting up to 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD

[EarthDog]

See post my above. The article linked butchered the names of the boards.

However, I still disagree with your 2010 date for sata III boards. If they had them functional in May, why wouldnt they be out starting now?

[Joeteck]

See post my above. The article linked butchered the names of the boards.

However, I still disagree with your 2010 date for sata III boards. If they had them functional in May, why wouldnt they be out starting now?


does not matter, its not sata3.

GA-P55-UD4P (http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=3161&ProductName=GA-P55-UD4P)

because there are no hard drive that offer SATA 3 tech... Yet, however, will be by 2010...

[EarthDog]

Then the ENTIRE article is wrong what do you want me to say bub? I thought it was out, went to the google machine found a supporting article WITH PIX from a repuatable site...

[EarthDog]

There is a sata III drive launching shortly...... Im now afraid to post articles up! ROFLMAO.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADBR_enUS316US316&q=Seagate+sata+III+drive


EDIT:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8153&Itemid=47

The Serial ATA 6Gb/s Solution: Barracuda XT Drives and Motherboards from ASUS and GIGABYTE

With Barracuda XT drives and SATA 6Gb/s motherboards from ASUS and Gigabyte, computer makers can build the highest-performance PCs, workstations and entry-level servers. ASUS was first to market with a SATA 6Gb/s motherboard; the company's P7P55D Premium began shipping in August. The new GIGABYTE P55 series GA-P55-Extreme motherboards are also now shipping.

Well well well, wrong board, but the fact remains. There are mobos out there now.....and that HDD will be out well before 2010.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131598&cm_re=P7P55D-_-13-131-598-_-Product

[Joeteck]

There is a sata III drive launching shortly...... Im now afraid to post articles up! ROFLMAO.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADBR_enUS316US316&q=Seagate+sata+III+drive


EDIT:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8153&Itemid=47



Well well well, wrong board, but the fact remains. there are mobos out there now.....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131598&cm_re=P7P55D-_-13-131-598-_-Product


Hey, you found ONE.

By 2010, there will be more... lots. Including hard drives to plug into them...

[EarthDog]

Hey, you found ONE.

By 2010, there will be more... lots. Including hard drives to plug into them...One is still more accurate than....We will not see mobos with this feature until 2010 some time..and......Can you buy those boards right now? no... There is no rush for it, because there hard drives out with it.... again, 2010 sometime...(assuming you meant no HDD's as this is out currently overseas and etailers at least) http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=1083025

http://www.span.com/product_info.php?products_id=27504&source=gbaseus&currency=USD

Look, for some reason, you and I seem to be teetering on a ****ing contest. So to avoid that (for some reason your posts just seem borderline abrasive to me) Im just going to back away from this thread. :)

[jason4207]

Hmmm.... So from all this data, we need to do RAID 10 and with 6 or 8 drives, being either 500gig, 1TB or 1.5TB. Taking the fastest part of all three or four for the boot partition and the remainder for the data... and have speed and redundancy too..

Very doable.

To get max performance you want to RAID0 a portion of each disk. Intel only supports up to 6 drives in RAID, but if you had 4 drives (I wouldn't bother w/ 6) you could slice out 75GB from each drive for a 300GB super-fast RAID0 array.

Then you can leave the remainder of the space untouched, or you can RAID10 it for a huge redundant array. Use it for data or backups or whatever you desire. Just seems silly to just leave it unformatted and going to complete waste to me.

You can do all this via the Intel RAID BIOS. There is no need to jump through all those hoops in the article unless you are just very determined to hide a portion of your HDDs from certain applications (to make certain benchmarks appear better). Just go into the Intel RAID BIOS (cntrl-I during boot) and create a RAID0 array first and select a size of 300GB. Then create a RAID10 array and use the remainder of the space. The RAID10 array will still be wicked fast as it'll be the same speed as a 2 drive RAID0 array.


For a hard drive to work fast, its need to read data off the disk. The inside edge of the platters is the fastest part of the drive, since the distance is shorter than the middle or outer edge of the platter, plus and the latency would be the fastest. So, partitioning the drive(s), in a RAID 0 configuration, while using only the first 80gig of each drive, you're making a VERY fast bootable partition. Or short stroking

I may be wrong, but I thought that the entire platter had the same aerial density across it's surface. The outer edge of the platter has to travel farther than the same section on the inner part of the platter given the same amount of time. Thus, more data passes across the head in the same amount of time when the head is towards the outside of the platter. As long as the head stays near the outside of the platter seek times will remain small.

So, it's actually the outside edge of the platters that is the fastest unless I'm mistaken.

Short-stroking just means you are limiting the distance the head has to travel b/c all the data is stored in 1 area of the platter instead of all the way across it. You can do this at the MATRIX (or similar) BIOS level by setting the array size appropriately, or you can do it at the OS level by setting the partition size appropriately. The end result is the same as far as actual performance.

I could install 4 drives and make a huge RAID0 array that spans the entire disks, and then as I install the OS (or from w/n Windows in your case since it's not the boot drive) I could make a 300GB partition. Alternatively, I could just create a 300GB RAID0 array in the Intel Matrix RAID BIOS. The performance of both 300GB sections would be exactly the same.

[mjw21a]

Meh, SATA3 will only ever matter with SSD's as they get faster. Hmmmm, I wish Hynix would hurry up and start producing Z-RAM chips. I'd love to see high capacity and high performance SSD's built using Z-RAM. It'd be truly awesome!

[jgv115]

That article was written pre-P55 release date. A few weeks after that article was written, it was said that there was something wrong with the SATAIII controllers and they had to be taken off the motherboards. ASRock are shipping their motherboards with a SATAIII PCI Expansion. I THINK

[Joeteck]

To get max performance you want to RAID0 a portion of each disk. Intel only supports up to 6 drives in RAID, but if you had 4 drives (I wouldn't bother w/ 6) you could slice out 75GB from each drive for a 300GB super-fast RAID0 array.

Then you can leave the remainder of the space untouched, or you can RAID10 it for a huge redundant array. Use it for data or backups or whatever you desire. Just seems silly to just leave it unformatted and going to complete waste to me.

You can do all this via the Intel RAID BIOS. There is no need to jump through all those hoops in the article unless you are just very determined to hide a portion of your HDDs from certain applications (to make certain benchmarks appear better). Just go into the Intel RAID BIOS (cntrl-I during boot) and create a RAID0 array first and select a size of 300GB. Then create a RAID10 array and use the remainder of the space. The RAID10 array will still be wicked fast as it'll be the same speed as a 2 drive RAID0 array.







I may be wrong, but I thought that the entire platter had the same aerial density across it's surface. The outer edge of the platter has to travel farther than the same section on the inner part of the platter given the same amount of time. Thus, more data passes across the head in the same amount of time when the head is towards the outside of the platter. As long as the head stays near the outside of the platter seek times will remain small.

So, it's actually the outside edge of the platters that is the fastest unless I'm mistaken.

Short-stroking just means you are limiting the distance the head has to travel b/c all the data is stored in 1 area of the platter instead of all the way across it. You can do this at the MATRIX (or similar) BIOS level by setting the array size appropriately, or you can do it at the OS level by setting the partition size appropriately. The end result is the same as far as actual performance.

I could install 4 drives and make a huge RAID0 array that spans the entire disks, and then as I install the OS (or from w/n Windows in your case since it's not the boot drive) I could make a 300GB partition. Alternatively, I could just create a 300GB RAID0 array in the Intel Matrix RAID BIOS. The performance of both 300GB sections would be exactly the same.

I think you're correct. I wrote it wrong. Hence, when we benchmark our drive(s) using HD tach, we see the performance arch..

With two 150gig raptors in RAID 0, what do you recommend in a slice size to be the fastest? 100gig, 50gig each?

[jason4207]

What I'd do is to run a HD Tach (or find one online) and look at the performance curve. You'll see where it starts to drop off pretty quickly, and I'd slice it before that point. But, make sure you have enough space for what you want to do.

This will ensure that your throughput is maxed. To get seek times as low as possible I think it's best to make it as small as possible.

[cw823]

I think it's best to make it as small as possible.

That's what she said.

[jason4207]

That's what she said.

I thought she said the opposite?

:burn:

[mjw21a]

I thought she said the opposite?

:burn:

I daresay that depends..... Too small and the data won't fit.....