Serial ATA drives?

Alan Mills · #1 (**permalink**) 05-05-2004, 02:08 PM

Speccing out my new PC with the vendor, I asked if I could add a DVDreader to go with the writer for disk duplication. He said no the current config (3 x HDD + DVD writer) already used up all the EIDE slots.

The chap said I could change one of the HDDs to a Serial ATA interface and then could add a reader.

Is this a good thing? Anything I ought to know about SATA drives? Will i see any difference at all?

The cost of the change is not prohibitive - it's about £20

Marc Peters · #2 (**permalink**) 05-05-2004, 03:17 PM

In theory, the switch to SATA over IDE (PATA etc etc) will improve bandwidth and therefore perfomance. Top range IDE drives are can be better than "generic" SATA drives, but the very best SATA drives tend to outperfom the best IDE has to offer. Yep, confusing, huh?

See if they'll spec you out a WD Raptor SATA (10,000 RPM spin rate) as a boot drive. Will give you less GB/£, but better perfomance.

Marc Peters · #3 (**permalink**) 05-05-2004, 03:20 PM

But wait. Assuming there are 3 IDE channels, you could always hook the optical drives up in parallel. Not the best config for direct DVD copying ("on the fly"), but it can be done!

MoJoe · #4 (**permalink**) 05-08-2004, 03:06 AM

what does he mean by changing to the interface? That could mean that he's getting an ATA to SATA converter which really doesn't increase bandwidth. It looks like you should be doing SATA though. And for that matter, you should probably have two of the hard drives in SATA onboard RAID for increased performance. if you're not using RAID though, the SATA performance won't be much better than the ATA performance. But hey, again this is a workstation, so you should have RAID.

And Marc: I think he Already is using PATA; basically all modern computers have two IDE channels and he's maxed out at four drives meaning two drives per channel. again, that's another performance hit that he needs to counter (file transfer between hard drives can be very, very slow)

in short: GET RAID! I have it and it's cheap and fast

Marc Peters · #5 (**permalink**) 05-08-2004, 09:26 AM

I was assuming there were 3 IDE channels (and everything connected in parrallel) as surely no PC vendor would attach a DVD-ROM in parrallel to a HDD. There would def be a perfromance issue there.

I seem to remember from my brief spell at a PC firm that some motherboards with onboard RAID had 3 IDE channels - so that means you could have upto 4 x HDD and 2 X optical drives.

If my first assumption was correct, then the vendor could merely attach the second optical drive in parrallel with the existing one. If not, then the only way to add more drives would be to use the SATA connection on the motherboard.

MoJoe · #6 (**permalink**) 05-08-2004, 05:55 PM

hmm, I've never encountered one of those motherboards but I'm sure they exist. I really doubt that this is one of them though. There are almost no motherboards that come today with onboard IDE RAID and all that I have seen have two IDE channels. Oh yeah, and a PC vendor would make a hard drive a slave to an optical drive. My dad bought an eMachines a few months ago with a CD-RW and an 80GB HDD. I curiously opened it up to see what was inside and I found that the HDD was a slave to the CD-RW. I immediately remedied the situation, but this kind of stuff does happen. I think they do it to save a cable and to keep a channel open for easier future upgrades or something.

tongachutt · #7 (**permalink**) 05-09-2004, 03:28 PM

Do you really need the DVD reader as well as the writer? Even when you do 1-1 disc copies its usually better to write an image to the HDD and burn that, Nero does this even if you have two drives unless you copy on the fly and this method is (was last time I tried) more succeptable to buffer-overruns/wasted discs.

Me - I'd stick with just the one DVD-burner.

tonga

Alan Mills · #8 (**permalink**) 05-09-2004, 05:04 PM

Was more interested in having a region 1 and a seperate region 2 drive to be honest.

All that chat about RAID. I have no idea what it all means. I thought RAID was when one disk maintained a copy of another. clearly there are other meanings.

tongachutt · #9 (**permalink**) 05-09-2004, 05:50 PM

Is it no longer possible to unlock or buy DVD drives to play any region?

There are many different RAID configurations check http://www.acnc.com/raid.html for their definitions and what they do.

Basically:
Raid 0 (striped) array speeds up disc read/write and so is good for video editing.
Raid 1 (mirrored) array is a fault tollerant setup which is good for backup.
Raid 0+1 (striped and mirrored) both speeds up disk access and backs up all your data, you need 3 hdd minimum fir this setup.
You need either a RAID capable mobo or a PCI raid controller to achieve RAID configurations.

If you are configuring a new PC make sure that the motherboard has both IDE and SATA(which often comes with an onboard raid controller) to give yourself the most options/best upgrade path.

tonga

Marc Peters · #10 (**permalink**) 05-09-2004, 06:13 PM

I use DVDidle DVD Region-Free to play DVDs from other regions. Works a treat!