Question on SSD to PCI or SSD to IDE? Pentium III

[JanusClerk]

Scroll down to summarize" section, if you want to go to the question.

Hello, i just recently registrated this forum but i was a reader for a good time

I'm actually in a project of trying to obtain the maximum performance out of a Dual Pentium III-S 1.4Ghz Tualatin (currently overclocked to 1.6Ghz at 155Mhz bus speed, but waiting for overclocking it further more because of an old soundcard which can't work with more speed bus)

Now, i'm planning to buy a Corsair 60GB SSD, but i have actually 2 HDD Sata (500GB-sata2 and 250GB-sata1) connected into a SATA to PCI controller.

I know the bottlenecks of PCI to SATA technology (and obviously of SSD) though i think i will get a boost performance installing an SSD (and whatever i want to try it).

As i'm using a Pentium III, PCI-e and onboard sata connections are not an otpions, so i will have to install the SSD via PCI or IDE controller/adapter.

I have some questions..., the PCI speed badnwith is shared by all the cards connected to it, so perhaps i should try to avoid this using my IDE interface.. but again i don't know.


In summarize:
Which scenario you think would do the best performance for my SSD?

1- SSD alone on PCI (and i will buy then a 1TB SATA to connect via IDE)
2- SSD + 1 HDD on PCI and the other HDD on IDE
3- SSD + 1 new 1TB HDD (which i will buy)
4- My currently set up of two hdd's on PCI and SSD on IDE

I would want to evade to buy an extra HDD SATA, and keep my currently ones, but if i have to do it (because is the best option), i wwill do it.

I appreciate any comments on it, thank you!

 

[JCLW]

i440BX? P2B-D?
i815? 6A815EPD?
i820? i840?
*cough*VIA*cough*?

On the i440 intel chipsets the ICH (southbridge) sat on the PCI bus (133MB/s) so it wouldn't make any difference where you connected the drives.

The VIA chipsets used the "Vlink" bus, which could push 266MB/s.

The i8XX chipset also used a 266MB/s bus, called "IHA (Intel Hub Architecture)".

 

[JanusClerk]

Oh, thank you for your reply JCLW, i have an Asus CUV4X-D with 2 lin-lin socket 370 adapters so it can carry 2 Tualatin CPU's (the motherboard natively only could support coppermine chips).

The chipset is from VIA, VIA 694XDP. (VT82C686B southbridge)

I just recently saw that my motherboard only supports up to Ultra ATA/100 so 100MB/s will be the maximum transfer speed from an IDE meanwhile PCI i have it overclocked to 38Mhz, so 155MB/s. I guess my best option is a controller sata to pci.

About that vlink you comment i don't know what is it, are you sure that my chipset can support it? would it be on IDE interface on or PCI also? it sounds pretty interesting.

 

[jmdixon85]

Well I know your currently running your harddrives off the PCI bus so I'm sure you already know this. But I would HIGHLY recommended against using any storage device over an overclocked PCI bus (or any other O/C bus) especially if you value your data

 

[JCLW]

If it is a VIA DDR board, it would support Vlink. Vlink is basically a higher speed bus linking the north and south bridges.

[IDE devices]
|
[Southbridge]<---Vlink--->[Northbridge]<--->[CPU,MEM,AGP]
|
(PCI bus)
|
|---[PCI slot]
|
|---[PCI slot]
|
|---[PCI slot]
|
|---[Onboard PCI device (ethernet, audio, etc)]

Unfortunately, I believe the CUV4X-D is a older SDRAM VIA board which means that your southbridge is actually hanging off PCI bus itself.

[Northbridge]<--->[CPU,MEM,AGP]
|
(PCI bus)
|
|---[Southbridge]---[IDE devices]
|
|---[PCI slot]
|
|---[PCI slot]
|
|---[PCI slot]
|
|---[Onboard PCI device (ethernet, audio, etc)]

Sorry for the poor graphics.

As you can see in the top drawing, the IDE devices do not need to ride the PCI bus to the northbridge.

In the lower drawing, you can see that they do.

 

[jmdixon85]

^I think for not using a picture of the chipset/mobo layout you done a very good job of explaining things

 

[JanusClerk]

You are correct JCLW in your assumption, the CUV4X-D uses SDRAM of RAM and not DDR (by the way i topped it to the max that can support this board which is 4GB of SDRAM PC133 ). An excel·lent explanation of the v-link and a nice graph, thanks.

jmdixon85, i'm not aware of the risks of using HDD over an overclocked PCI bus so i want to learn it now, i would appreciate more details. I didn't wanted actually to overclock the pci bus per se, but the only way to overclock this tuallies on this board is increasing the FSB (it doesnt let me to increase the multipliers, they are fixed). I increased the FSB from 133 to 155, and so, if i'm not mistaken, the pci bus is also increased (155/4 = 38Mhz which is 152MB/s of bandwith on the pci).

Anyway, i believe that shouldn't be a problem to HDDs because my SATA to PCI controller is for SATA1, so its maximum transfer speed is 150MB/s and though the two hdd i have are SATA2 i "jumpered them" to set them as SATA1, so they shouldn't run over the limit of 150MB/s.

Or actually they could go any higher? if so, i suppose could be some sort of sync problems... or am i missing a lot of things?

 

[repo man11]

For what it's worth, I put a fairly fast SATA drive on a PCI SATA controller on a KT7A motherboard. The increase in speed over a fast PATA drive wasn't that significant. Testing the same card and drive on a DDR KT600 motherboard gave me quite a bit faster drive speeds; my assumption was memory bandwidth made all of the difference. And that was even though I had the KT7A at about 150 FSB, and the KT600 at the default 133.

 

[jmdixon85]

Well, when you overclock any bus you risk data curruption. I would hate to know you got a SSD just to get BSOD and loose all your data

Basically, you can't push the PCI bus much until it becomes unstable and any data that uses the bus becomes "scrambled".

It's been a while since a pci/agp/pcie/ lock has been an issue. But I'm sure you have heard of audio/lan etc dropping out after an overclock on these old systems?

I'm not familar with your motherboard but if it hasn't got a PCI/AGP lock chances are the bus has also been overclocked and is there for "unreliable" to transfer important data accross the bus

 

[repo man11]

I ran a KT7A at over 150 MHz FSB for well over a year with no issues. I ran my 8K3A+ at up to 209 FSB before hard drive performance began to suffer. It ran at that speed for over a year as well. My first overclocked computer was an Asus P55T2P4, with a K6-2+ 450 at 500 MHz using the 83 MHz bus. That also resulted in a 38 MHz PCI bus. With all of these, I was aware that I could have a problem with some hardware not working - but I never did.

 

[wingman99]

I would use PCI to SATA for best performance of a SSD

 

[JanusClerk]

repo, when i changed my IDE HDD to the SATA ones i'm currently using (around 2 years ago) i did notice an increase of performance, it wasnt subtle. I suppose that the SSD will improve further more the loading times for example on games, but that's the experiment. i want to do.

You feel noticeable difference with your DDR KT600, not only for your main memory but also for having more L1 and L2 cache, and also these ones were more faster than your KT7A. More than RAM, increasing the speed and size of the caches has an enormous impact on the system overall, if we just could touch those for upgrading..., hehe

jmdixon, i see... prolly i will not be able to increase more further the fsb, i'm feeling that i'm streetching the pci currently, and no, my bios doesn't let me to lock the pci/agp bus. It gives me the option to the System/RAM ratio which i set it to 4/3, but not related to pci or agp. Anyway, i will try to buy a new soundcard because i know it's the weak device of my system now and i will try to push a little more the fsb till it let me do.

Aside of the data of the storages, now i know, all my important data are being backed up so i will be safe if the worst happens

wing, yup, finally the best option is pci to sata, and connected to it will be the ssd and a new 1TB sata. (the other 2 i will use them as a backup copy).

THank you for all your replys, i will be back to tell you how were went everything with the ssd and if it is a noticable performance for a pretty old system or not.

 

[repo man11]

You feel noticeable difference with your DDR KT600, not only for your main memory but also for having more L1 and L2 cache, and also these ones were more faster than your KT7A. More than RAM, increasing the speed and size of the caches has an enormous impact on the system overall, if we just could touch those for upgrading..., hehe

No, this was using the same CPU (an XP2000) in both boards. Comparing the read speed in MBPS using the Vopt XP defrag program, the difference in speed with the Seagate SATA 500 gigabyte drive on the PCI SATA controller Vs. the WD 8 megabyte PATA drive was disappointing. Moving the drive and controller from the KT133A SDRAM motherboard to the KT600 DDR motherboard showed a very significant increase in read speed in MBPS using the same program. The chipset and memory on the KT133A board were the choke point.

 

[~(o)-(0)~]

I'm also gonna step in and caution you about your PCI bus, they're flaky as hell when overclocked. That's not to say you won't be fine, but I've had lots of grief with boards that don't have a divider when overclocking.

Otherwise sounds like a cool project, I love old hardware! I'd really like to find a quad slot 1 board to play around with.