SATA- Is it worth it?

Plastic · l33t Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 649

I am about to purchase a new hard drive for my PC. It will probably be a 120GB or a 160GB, 7200 RPM. On my nForce2 motherboard is a Sil3112A SATA controller. Are the drivers stable enough for me to use a SATA drive as my boot device? (I use recent 2.6 kernels, I'll probably use Reiser4 too) Would I notice a speed boost from my previous hard drive? (Seagate 40GB 5400 RPM PATA)

boothepa · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 49 Location: Austin, TX

The quick answer is YES.

Not only will this SATA drive have a faster seek time but the bandwidth for a SATA drive is significantly better than that of a simple ATA drive. Personally I recommend a WesternDigital Raptor SATA drive @ 10K rpm. If ye be wise and cunning, run a RAID 0 on that controller with another SATA, preferably a Raptor. Then you're likely to see a HUGE difference, particularly if you're doing any kind of web serving or such.
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Um...Hook 'em horns?

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

Plastic · l33t Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 649

But what about the drivers? How is the Sil3112A support in the 2.6.x kernels?

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

It's supported in vanilla 2.6 and I've gotten it to work. It also works well in OpenBSD 3.5.

boothepa · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 49 Location: Austin, TX

Reliability issues are what backups strategies are for. RAID 5 is better, obviously, but his particular controller supports only RAID 0/1/10.

There are two kinds of people in this world:
1. Those who make backups
2. Those who have never had a hard-drive fail
_________________
Um...Hook 'em horns?

poormanscomputer · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 114

No!

You will not notice any significant speed boost. Unless you plan on buying a Raptor drive any time soon, don't mess with it. The bottleneck is at the hard drive, not the controller. 5400RPM is a little slow for today's drives. I'm happy with my 8mb Hitachi IDE (200GB), hdparm scores 58MB/s!!! (Nforce2 BTW)

Not to mention the fact that SATA support in linux is still experimental.

Hope this helps,

poorman

malv · n00b Joined: 07 Jul 2004 Posts: 69

[quote="poormanscomputer"]No!

You will not notice any significant speed boost. Unless you plan on buying a Raptor drive any time soon, don't mess with it. The bottleneck is at the hard drive, not the controller. 5400RPM is a little slow for today's drives. I'm happy with my 8mb Hitachi IDE (200GB), hdparm scores 58MB/s!!! (Nforce2 BTW)

Not to mention the fact that SATA support in linux is still experimental.

Hope this helps,

poorman[/quote]

I second this.
SATA is not worth the money, unless you have big server load requirements. I don' t want to bring up SATA problems which clearly crop up once in a while.

Get 7200rpm IDE with 8MB cache. The best volume to price ratio is at about 200GB. Don' t buy the 250GB they are too expensive.

For the price difference with SATA, get yourself a 200GB 5400rpm external USB2/Firewire unit. Great for backups. Again, raid is not worth it unless you ABSOLUTELY require it for real time security. Don' t forget that in typical home raid setups, everything still sits in the same box which constitutes a bigger risk than drive failure: (1) power supply mishaps ruining everything in your box; (2) fire in your room; (3) burglars stealing your rig. With your USB2/firewire external you avoid such threats because you should store it in a locaton remote of your computer. The only risk is a loss of data in case of a much less likely disk failure mishap.

On top, if you are setup like this, lots of disk, you can routinely do partition backups before undertaking any "risky" portage operation.

malv · n00b Joined: 07 Jul 2004 Posts: 69

[quote="malv"][quote="poormanscomputer"]No!

You will not notice any significant speed boost. Unless you plan on buying a Raptor drive any time soon, don't mess with it. The bottleneck is at the hard drive, not the controller. 5400RPM is a little slow for today's drives. I'm happy with my 8mb Hitachi IDE (200GB), hdparm scores 58MB/s!!! (Nforce2 BTW)

Not to mention the fact that SATA support in linux is still experimental.

Hope this helps,

poorman[/quote]

I second this.
SATA is not worth the money, unless you have big server load requirements. I don' t want to bring up SATA problems which clearly crop up once in a while.

Get 7200rpm IDE with 8MB cache. The best volume to price ratio is at about 200GB. Don' t buy the 250GB they are too expensive.

For the price difference with SATA, get yourself another 200+GB 5400rpm external USB2/Firewire unit. Great for backups. Again, raid is not worth it unless you ABSOLUTELY require it for real time security. Don' t forget that in typical home raid setups, everything still sits in the same box which constitutes a bigger risk than drive failure by itself: (1) power supply mishaps ruining everything in your box; (2) fire in your room; (3) burglars stealing your rig. With your USB2/firewire external you avoid such threats because you should store it in a locaton remote of your computer. The only risk is a loss of data in case of a much less likely disk failure mishap. Such loss is typically small if you kept to any reasonable backup schedule.

On top, if you are setup like this having lots of available disk, you can routinely do partition backups before undertaking any "risky" portage operation.

serendipity · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2004 Posts: 69

YES! It is worth it. Those of you who don't seem to agree: have you guys actually run SATA drives on Gentoo boxes?

My system, running for 4 months now on 2x Maxtor 7200rpm SATAs in RAID 0 on the Intel ICH5-R (tricky to get working initially) is absolutely ROCK SOLID STABLE. I could even get away with running the machine as a production server, it's that stable.

Data reliability: well hell, that's what backups are for. I have a dedicated external USB disk for backups, as well as writing to DVD. If I have to trust my data to the (relative?) reliability of RAID0 versus no-RAID, I'd say I should perhaps reevaluate my backup strategy. I assume that any and all disks can and will fail at some time. It's just a question of when.

Never had problems with SATA and SATA RAID0 on linux, and it runs at warp speed too...

poormanscomputer · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 114

Well comparing a RAID 0 setup on SATA is no comparison to ONE DRIVE on IDE. That's just not fair. And (94MB/s)/2=47MB/s
I'd like to see comparisons of a RAID setup on IDE vs SATA, but this is immaterial, because Plastic is not looking for RAID setup.
SATA is still experimental, but it does depend on the controller.

There's no reason to upgrade with linux in mind, unless those Raptor drives come down in cost. 10KRPM is very nice, I must say. But, for those of you who don't think support is experimental, try looking around at the LKML for a while, and get back to me.

Regards,

poorman

serendipity · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2004 Posts: 69

Sure it's not fair to compare, but them I am not comparing. The post is about stability of the SATA drivers under linux. My point was that it is stable on SATA RAID 0.

The speed remark was secondary to the main issue, and really just made as an aside. The overall RAID array hdparm figure is not actually the simple double of each drive's figure: there is some overhead and so you'll find that individual drive performance is higher than 47Mbps

sindre · Guru Joined: 01 Nov 2002 Posts: 315 Location: Norway

It will be worth it when ncq is common on sata-chipsets/drives.

molander · Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2004 2:40 pm Post subject:

The main advantage of the raptor is not transfer rate. Its access time. My PC boots into KDE in 9 seconds after I press the ON button. Before I had the raptor my box took around 17 seconds with a 180G WD 7200rpm 8mb cache ATA133 drive. Ill take the raptor in my amd64 any day of the week. Its as fast as any 10k SCSI drive for 75% of the price. SATA controllers are also cheaper than comparable SCSI controller. Obviously SCSI is better in many ways, but for desktop use.... If you plunge for a raptor, make sure you get the 75G version. There are differences betweek the two different sizes.

So I would say SATA is definitely worth it. I am a developer and compile large projects all day long. There is a huge difference between now (w/ raptor and before). Example, I can bootstrap a new gentoo system in 45 minutes, KDE takes ~3 hours on an unused system. SATA drives do not cost that much more and the size of the cables definitely helps with cooling. I have some round IDE cables but they are stiffer and sit where they want to. The SATA cables are thing and flexible and can be bent out of the way easily.

If you are not getting a raptor, then there might be a dilemma. If you need performance, dont want scsi and plan to get a raptor, there is no comparison for PATA vs SATA. A raptor on a good SATA controller will beat any PATA drive. Try it and see for yourself, you will not be dissapointed.

reaz82 · Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2004 3:44 pm Post subject:

not worth it unless you get yourself a 10K SATA drive. SATA is good for storage requirements as there are thinner wires strung around etc. for a desktop computer with a 7200rpm hard drive any 160GB IDE hard drive with an 8mb buffer is very good.