SATA II vs. SATA 150

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Nubius said:
sounds fancy and will get you to purchase it because it's 'newer' which means 'better' to most

they aren't lying...because it IS transferring 300mb/sec over the cable, doesn't mean your hard drive can actually write that much though
how fast does a hard drive write?
 
gaara said:
You won't notice ANY difference between SATAI and SATAII guys, hard drives just simply don't spin fast enough to take advantage of the 150mb/sec bandwidth

To put it into perspective, you have two 7200RPM drives. One uses SATAI and the other uses SATAII. Despite SATAII appearing faster, boht drives are still spinning the same therefore the data on both is still accessed in the same time frame and therefore the bandwidth is identical. Basically what I'm saying is hard drive bandwidth isn't the bottleneck when determining how fast your drive reads/writes, it depends on rotation speed and cache size

Even using a RAID 0 array with two 10000RPM drives you won't notice a difference between SATAI and II

Just wondering is there are not any improvement or difference between SATAI & SATAII why they sell that??

To take advantage of that "speed", what you must posses or buy to get that improvement, that if they exist..?!?
 
I'll throw in my 2 cents into the mix too.

I agree with gaara that SATA II wont give you a noticable performance increase over SATA 150. And, as he put it, the bottleneck is the drive itself, not it's interface.

In fact, the average sustained transfer rate of a 7200 rpm HD is about 55-60 MBps (Megabytes per second). Keep in mind that SATA 150 can transfer up to 150MBps. THere is a huge difference already. Mind you, there is something called burst rate, which more involves the cache of the hard drive, which can transfer a small amount of data very quickly.

Now, if you consider a SATA II HD which has a maximum transfer rate of 300MBps, you might ask what the average sustained transfer rate of a SATA II drive is. Well, it is exactly the same, around 55-60 MBps.

Even with a 10000rpm hard drive, all you really need is SATA 150 to keep up with the data transfer rate, although I'm not sure what the avg sustained transfer rate on a 10k drive is...

In short, SATA II is meant for people that are bedazzled by big numbers that dont mean much for real-world performance.
 
sata II, besides having theoretical faster speeds, also makes use of NCQ. This is native command queuing, which you can read up on somewhere else. It basically reorders commands given to the drive, so that drive locations are accessed sequentially rather than haphazardly, hence increasing efficiency. In reality, you will see only see subtle improvements, and more on server, or programs that need read/write access to large amounts of files across a drive.

For now, with drive mechanics and drive density pretty much unchanging, there will be no improvement unless you have multiple raid-0 arrays, wherein the extra bandwidth is enabled. But, if drive densities were to increase vastly, leading to faster transfer times, then that 300mb/s pipeline will be needed.

to be quite honest, i can't see it happening enough to come near reaching 300mb/s, but anyway, they will sell enough new mobo's and hdd for the gullible. When they have newer storage technologies (i think there is one that is perpindicular storage) then they probably will come out with a new interface for it, rendering sata2 obsolete.


edit: if you still want to make use of ncq, you can, seagate puts out a range of sata1 drives that have ncq. I have a 160GB model, but you will need a chipset that supports it, such as the nforce4. Note, that i don't have a mobo that supports it so i can't give you real world results.
 
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