"BSchnur" wrote in message
om...
One interesting thing in terms of performance -- hard drives (aside
from WD Raptor drives and virtually any SCSI drive) for desktops run at
7200 RPM. The newer SATA and IDE drives might have a 16M onboard
cache, but in terms of sustained performance data transfer, you are not
likely to see much better performance than an ATA 100 (let alone 133 or
Sata 150) than you already are getting.

About the only place where Sata 300 might show up in real performance
gains if you are running a RAID 5 SATA array with 4 or more drives in
the array -- and that's with an add in controller which includes
onboard cache of its own.


--
Barry Schnur


for sustained I/O, I agree. And yes, my drive has a 16MB cache, and I know
that the SATA 300 (2.0) is really what the max buffer I/O is rated at, not
the sustained I/O of the drive. But Im a geek, and I want to know if there
is any real difference, and if there IS a difference i want to know 'why'. I
also am curious as to why SATA mode for my controller was soooo much slower
than IDE when I installed vista the first time.

Using HDTach, my disk is peaking at about 130M/s (burst), and I know it
should be way higher. the sustained I/O isnt terrible, and averages about
65M/s.

I know lots and lots about Raid, as I work with it every single day. Mostly
SCSI U320 arrays on HP and Dell servers, with an odd IBM box tossed in for
variety. A fair amount of EMC DMX and Clariion stuff over Fibre Channel as
well.

I will probably do a local C: and system state backup before i start
changing the controller drivers and switching the controller mode in the
bios. At least that way, it should be a quick recovery back to where I was
before I made any changes.

Thanks for the input ...

- NuTs