Thoughts on Serial ATA - Page 2

Joe · 03-15-2002, 06:48 AM

Brad you always live in your own world of pipe dreams and fantasy.

I love hearing you talk about technology that you are "sure" about years before the implementation is even close to reaching a consumer market... and most of the time is totally different than what you were preaching. Mainly cause you seem to trust everything to read on the web, or what any marketing geek tells you.

How about you come back down to earth ok?

66mhz/64bit IDE adapters, PCI-X IDE adapters, 10kRPM IDE drives.... hehehehe sounds like someone who just doesnt want to go SCSI,and wants to spend too much money on "consumer" quality hardware.

Yes ATA/IDE is consumer quality, always has been, always will be.

Butcher · 03-15-2002, 07:21 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by WebMasta33
We can't use the speeds of parallel ATA because it's parallel. It's alot more effort for the computer to time the signals to have them run down the cable in perfect parallel, vs a serial connection, where they can just stream down one after the other.

Oh man, that had me laughing out loud. That is just so wrong it's mind blowing. Computers work in parallel best, if parallel is so bad why are the memory bus, the PCI bus, the AGP bus etc. etc. parallel? Because it's FAST. Serial is cheap, and slow, and better for long distances. It is not fast.
As for the more effort that's just such utter shit. Given that the PCI bus is parallel to read a parallel signal it just asserts read on the ATA interface, write on the bus and dumps the data. To read serial it has to pull it one bit at a time through a shift register until it has the whole thing, then dump that to the bus. So given ATA is a 16 or 32 bit (I forget) interface you need the serial to be clocked 16-32 times faster. To achieve a transfer rate of 100mb/s requires a clock rate of 800MHz (at one bit per clock) minimum for serial. Given you can probably get a few bits per clock it might only be 200MHz or so. Now consider, how much more expensive/hot/difficult to produce is 200MHz hardware than 33MHz hardware? I'll tell you, a LOT. Fibre channel costs a crapload vs uscsi for exactly this reason.

Final words - if you want speed get scsi, if you want cheap get ata put up with slow speeds.

Brad · 03-15-2002, 03:09 PM

I didn't say that Joe, I was saying 66mhz 64bit pci won't be around for long, pci-x and 3gio will take it over.

And ide drives will go to 10k rpm, it's just a matter of time, we both know it

DigitalChaos · 03-15-2002, 10:57 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by iceheart
And on the more physical side of things, it allows us to get rid of the huge ugly ribbon cables!

how about rounded serial ata cables?

LOL that would just be messed up

Brad · 03-15-2002, 11:16 PM

just like those usb cables

DigitalChaos · 03-16-2002, 12:25 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Brad
just like those usb cables

huh? please dont tell me they make "rounded" usb cables.. thats about as lame as makin a "rounded" network cable =)

Brad · 03-16-2002, 12:33 AM

I was referring to the size of the cable, like how big a rounded SATA cable would be

Pyrotechnic · 03-16-2002, 01:53 PM

i've seen pics of a serial ata cable from comdex or something, anyways it's a real thin wire, like about the size of 2 pair 18 gauge speaker wire.

warp_zero · 03-17-2002, 08:54 PM

on that strange hdd suggestion by webmasta33, if you just made a hdd with 2 sets of heads you could have them be like raid0 for some (long read) operations, and also have multi-seeks for short operations so that they could both access the entire drive just have 2 of them doing it

WebMasta33 · 03-17-2002, 10:22 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by warp_zero
on that strange hdd suggestion by webmasta33, if you just made a hdd with 2 sets of heads you could have them be like raid0 for some (long read) operations, and also have multi-seeks for short operations so that they could both access the entire drive just have 2 of them doing it

That was I was saying... I guess I just didn't word it well.

warp_zero · 03-17-2002, 11:43 PM

yeah, i think it would be possible if you put one arm in the front of the drive and one in the back, and made the drive longer than normal. that would rule.

Joe · 03-18-2002, 01:51 AM

see multiple heads on the same platter is pointless. The way data is written to the platters is already pretty much as efficient as it can get. Spinning at even 5400 rpm shows that the effectiveness of 2 heads trying to read the same sectors on a platter wouldn't work. at 7200 or 10 or 15k RPM its even more pointless. You multiply the risk of a crash by 2, and the latency in just the controller of the board controlling 2 heads instead of 1 to find a certain data sector on the drive would be bad.

it would be a lot of work, a lot of hardware, and very little reward.

Leuf · 03-18-2002, 09:58 AM

120 GB WD = $192
60 GB WD = $118x2 = $236

Factor in the added complexity of putting double the heads on the 120 GB and I am not seeing the price/performance benefit.

On the other hand if you had the second head in there as a backup to the primary, as in it sits there parked until the primary breaks, that might be worthwhile. And the complexity wouldn't be as high since it doesn't have to control both heads at the same time. That might be a good enough level of backup in situations where raid 1 isn't justified.

Joe · 03-18-2002, 01:22 PM

well you would need a secondary spindle also. Since many drive deaths are caused by spindle failure, head crashing isnt as much of an issue. Normally if a head crashes its cause it lands on the disk platters, and damages the disk platter.

Brad · 03-18-2002, 07:19 PM

bear in mind the wd 120gb is 20-30% faster than their 60gb ones

Jason711 · 03-19-2002, 03:47 AM

its gonna rock once they come out with 10k ide drives and put 4 direct channels on each board.. that would be some sweet raid 5.. and cheap to boot, even 0+1.

Brad · 03-19-2002, 04:10 PM

abit and epox are shipping boards with 4 channel ide raid and two more normal channels, but they don't support raid 5, and I can't see too many boards having onboard ide raid 5 anytime soon, SATA will come out before that.

10k ide will be cool, especially if WD gets in on it

Jason711 · 03-19-2002, 06:57 PM

well, once serial ata becomes mainstream i see no reason why they wouldnt throw in raid 5, its so much better than 0 and cheaper than 0+1.

Joe · 03-19-2002, 08:33 PM

whoa whoa whoa... pull the mis information bus over to the side of the road and come out with your hands up!

Raid 5 is "so much better" than RAID 0? Explain that one to me!?

RAID 5 is SLOW.. wicked slow on write times, and terribly intensive on your controler cards ram, if it doesnt have ram.. then the write speed will be about where a single drive would be and you will have terrible CPU usage.

Better as in redundant? Yep I will give you that... But speed HELLLLL NOOOO

Butcher · 03-19-2002, 10:25 PM

If RAID 5 is important enough to you then you can afford SCSI. If not then put up with RAID 0. Frankly IDE RAID is pretty pointless - the seek time is the killer on desktop disk speed and RAID of any flavour does nothing to improve seeks. The only way to improve them is to buy a faster disk. SCSI anyone?

Jason711 · 03-19-2002, 11:13 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Joe
whoa whoa whoa... pull the mis information bus over to the side of the road and come out with your hands up!

Raid 5 is "so much better" than RAID 0? Explain that one to me!?

RAID 5 is SLOW.. wicked slow on write times, and terribly intensive on your controler cards ram, if it doesnt have ram.. then the write speed will be about where a single drive would be and you will have terrible CPU usage.

Better as in redundant? Yep I will give you that... But speed HELLLLL NOOOO

excuse me "mr. allknowingone" :P ... but you slam raid 5 in one aspect it and try to make it seem bad in ALL aspects. its read spead is a tad slower than 0, which in my book.. i like, and i will love the trade off a little bit of write speed for redundancy.. im sure alot of ppl would. in fact you would be stupid not to, but thats just my opinion.

Jason711 · 03-19-2002, 11:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Butcher
If RAID 5 is important enough to you then you can afford SCSI. If not then put up with RAID 0. Frankly IDE RAID is pretty pointless - the seek time is the killer on desktop disk speed and RAID of any flavour does nothing to improve seeks. The only way to improve them is to buy a faster disk. SCSI anyone?

the point, which im sorry escapes you, is that it is faster than a single IDE disk.. no it isnt SCSI, but this thread isnt about neither is it even compareing to SCSI. we all know SCSI is better, pointing that out is infact pointless. and again, you take one aspect, blow it out of proportion, and try to make the entire thing look bad. bad show.

Joe · 03-19-2002, 11:21 PM

just like all the raid versions.. there are specific uses for all them.

RAID5 is good for stuff that is mainly read time ( IE: web servers, etc...) But it should not be used in DB servers as the Read/Write lag kills performance.

How are you getting stats on Raid5 that says its write speed is just slightly slower then 0? On a high end SCSI card with megs of ram... Yep thats right. On an IDE card with no ram and no real hardware layer interface ( Most promise cards are all software level)... They will/would SUCK at RAID 5 simply cause there is NO write cache on the car.

1/0 and RAID 3 are favorites for people who have serious Read/Write access and want redundancy. Duplexing is of course the best of all but you have a 50% loss of storrage space. RAID 3 on a nice SCSI card is VERY nice, since you can put all the parity data on one specific drive and have it on its own SCSI channel. that way you dont have to wait for writing parity data to the same platters you are writing your real data on.

Jas, I am not a knowitall... I just have worked on RAID systems in professional settings for roughly 10 years. I am the Anti-RAID5 guy after I have seen how it has screwed up the speed of many DB's and file servers.

Redundancy is nice, but on a home PC should not come at the cost of performance.

Butcher · 03-20-2002, 12:16 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jason711

the point, which im sorry escapes you, is that it is faster than a single IDE disk.. no it isnt SCSI, but this thread isnt about neither is it even compareing to SCSI. we all know SCSI is better, pointing that out is infact pointless. and again, you take one aspect, blow it out of proportion, and try to make the entire thing look bad. bad show.

The increase in speed for a RAID set vs straight drives is negligable in almost all desktop access patterns yet you still seem to think it's amazing and then accuse me of blowing things out of proportion. Let me restate this since you missed it, access time is key, being able to pull 30 extra megs down in a second is irrelvevant as almost all reads are for a few k to a few megs. Having a few ms off your access time makes more difference than RAID in pretty much all circumstances. The only way to get that is to spin the disk faster. IDE is, when it comes down to it, bottom of the line and kept there for a reason - most people want cheap storage not good performance. If you're happy with IDE that's fine, but don't try to make out that RAIDing it or serial ATA or any other IDE gimmick will make it fast, it won't.
The point about SCSI is this - people are spending a crap load of cash on these IDE RAID setups etc. when they could just bite the ****ing bullet and buy SCSI for the same and get much better performance. Half the reason they do this is because people go round saying things like "2 disks in RAID0 is twice as fast!!" which is just BS. Then they buy it and either are dissapointed or convince themself it's really fast to avoid looking like a moron. Thus the cycle continues...

Jason711 · 03-20-2002, 12:22 AM

ok, ill take a bow from this one..

although, they sell ide cards that have cache on them. i know ide is no where near SCSI in terms of performance. i just think its being knocked too hard. most ppl cannot afford SCSI. so ide raid is the best it can get.

View Poll Results: Serial ATA. Good or bad?
Good	29	80.56%
Bad	0	0%
Indifferent	6	16.67%
Ain't gonna happen	1	2.78%
Voters: 36. You may not vote on this poll

03-15-2002, 06:48 AM	#26
Joe The Pro/Life Support System Join Date: Dec 1999 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 4,041	Brad you always live in your own world of pipe dreams and fantasy. I love hearing you talk about technology that you are "sure" about years before the implementation is even close to reaching a consumer market... and most of the time is totally different than what you were preaching. Mainly cause you seem to trust everything to read on the web, or what any marketing geek tells you. How about you come back down to earth ok? 66mhz/64bit IDE adapters, PCI-X IDE adapters, 10kRPM IDE drives.... hehehehe sounds like someone who just doesnt want to go SCSI,and wants to spend too much money on "consumer" quality hardware. Yes ATA/IDE is consumer quality, always has been, always will be. __________________ Joe - I only take this hat off for one thing... ProCooling archive curator and dusty skeleton.

03-15-2002, 03:09 PM	#28
Brad Thermophile Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Nuu Zeeelin Posts: 3,175	I didn't say that Joe, I was saying 66mhz 64bit pci won't be around for long, pci-x and 3gio will take it over. And ide drives will go to 10k rpm, it's just a matter of time, we both know it __________________ 2x P3 1100's at 1400, Abit VP6, 2x Corsair 256mb PC150 sticks, 20gb 'cuda ATA-III, 2x 40gb 'cuda ATA-IV in raid 0. 20" Trinitron. No fans 2x 2400+ at 2288mhz (16.0 x 143), Iwill MPX2, 2x Kingmax PC-3200 256mb sticks, 4x 20gb 60gxp in Raid 5 on a Promise SX6000. Asus Ti4200 320/630. Cooled by Water

03-15-2002, 11:16 PM	#30
Brad Thermophile Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Nuu Zeeelin Posts: 3,175	just like those usb cables __________________ 2x P3 1100's at 1400, Abit VP6, 2x Corsair 256mb PC150 sticks, 20gb 'cuda ATA-III, 2x 40gb 'cuda ATA-IV in raid 0. 20" Trinitron. No fans 2x 2400+ at 2288mhz (16.0 x 143), Iwill MPX2, 2x Kingmax PC-3200 256mb sticks, 4x 20gb 60gxp in Raid 5 on a Promise SX6000. Asus Ti4200 320/630. Cooled by Water

03-16-2002, 12:33 AM	#32
Brad Thermophile Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Nuu Zeeelin Posts: 3,175	I was referring to the size of the cable, like how big a rounded SATA cable would be __________________ 2x P3 1100's at 1400, Abit VP6, 2x Corsair 256mb PC150 sticks, 20gb 'cuda ATA-III, 2x 40gb 'cuda ATA-IV in raid 0. 20" Trinitron. No fans 2x 2400+ at 2288mhz (16.0 x 143), Iwill MPX2, 2x Kingmax PC-3200 256mb sticks, 4x 20gb 60gxp in Raid 5 on a Promise SX6000. Asus Ti4200 320/630. Cooled by Water

03-16-2002, 01:53 PM	#33
Pyrotechnic Cooling Savant Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 240	i've seen pics of a serial ata cable from comdex or something, anyways it's a real thin wire, like about the size of 2 pair 18 gauge speaker wire.

03-17-2002, 08:54 PM	#34
warp_zero Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: A.D. 2101 Posts: 65	on that strange hdd suggestion by webmasta33, if you just made a hdd with 2 sets of heads you could have them be like raid0 for some (long read) operations, and also have multi-seeks for short operations so that they could both access the entire drive just have 2 of them doing it __________________ sub_light@yahoo.com long live TRAAM-II

03-17-2002, 11:43 PM	#36
warp_zero Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: A.D. 2101 Posts: 65	yeah, i think it would be possible if you put one arm in the front of the drive and one in the back, and made the drive longer than normal. that would rule. __________________ sub_light@yahoo.com long live TRAAM-II

03-18-2002, 01:51 AM	#37
Joe The Pro/Life Support System Join Date: Dec 1999 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 4,041	see multiple heads on the same platter is pointless. The way data is written to the platters is already pretty much as efficient as it can get. Spinning at even 5400 rpm shows that the effectiveness of 2 heads trying to read the same sectors on a platter wouldn't work. at 7200 or 10 or 15k RPM its even more pointless. You multiply the risk of a crash by 2, and the latency in just the controller of the board controlling 2 heads instead of 1 to find a certain data sector on the drive would be bad. it would be a lot of work, a lot of hardware, and very little reward. __________________ Joe - I only take this hat off for one thing... ProCooling archive curator and dusty skeleton.

03-18-2002, 09:58 AM	#38
Leuf Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Dec 2001 Posts: 56	120 GB WD = $192 60 GB WD = $118x2 = $236 Factor in the added complexity of putting double the heads on the 120 GB and I am not seeing the price/performance benefit. On the other hand if you had the second head in there as a backup to the primary, as in it sits there parked until the primary breaks, that might be worthwhile. And the complexity wouldn't be as high since it doesn't have to control both heads at the same time. That might be a good enough level of backup in situations where raid 1 isn't justified.

03-18-2002, 01:22 PM	#39
Joe The Pro/Life Support System Join Date: Dec 1999 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 4,041	well you would need a secondary spindle also. Since many drive deaths are caused by spindle failure, head crashing isnt as much of an issue. Normally if a head crashes its cause it lands on the disk platters, and damages the disk platter. __________________ Joe - I only take this hat off for one thing... ProCooling archive curator and dusty skeleton.

03-18-2002, 07:19 PM	#40
Brad Thermophile Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Nuu Zeeelin Posts: 3,175	bear in mind the wd 120gb is 20-30% faster than their 60gb ones __________________ 2x P3 1100's at 1400, Abit VP6, 2x Corsair 256mb PC150 sticks, 20gb 'cuda ATA-III, 2x 40gb 'cuda ATA-IV in raid 0. 20" Trinitron. No fans 2x 2400+ at 2288mhz (16.0 x 143), Iwill MPX2, 2x Kingmax PC-3200 256mb sticks, 4x 20gb 60gxp in Raid 5 on a Promise SX6000. Asus Ti4200 320/630. Cooled by Water

03-19-2002, 03:47 AM	#41
Jason711 Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Florida Posts: 59	its gonna rock once they come out with 10k ide drives and put 4 direct channels on each board.. that would be some sweet raid 5.. and cheap to boot, even 0+1.

03-19-2002, 04:10 PM	#42
Brad Thermophile Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Nuu Zeeelin Posts: 3,175	abit and epox are shipping boards with 4 channel ide raid and two more normal channels, but they don't support raid 5, and I can't see too many boards having onboard ide raid 5 anytime soon, SATA will come out before that. 10k ide will be cool, especially if WD gets in on it __________________ 2x P3 1100's at 1400, Abit VP6, 2x Corsair 256mb PC150 sticks, 20gb 'cuda ATA-III, 2x 40gb 'cuda ATA-IV in raid 0. 20" Trinitron. No fans 2x 2400+ at 2288mhz (16.0 x 143), Iwill MPX2, 2x Kingmax PC-3200 256mb sticks, 4x 20gb 60gxp in Raid 5 on a Promise SX6000. Asus Ti4200 320/630. Cooled by Water

03-19-2002, 06:57 PM	#43
Jason711 Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Florida Posts: 59	well, once serial ata becomes mainstream i see no reason why they wouldnt throw in raid 5, its so much better than 0 and cheaper than 0+1.

03-19-2002, 08:33 PM	#44
Joe The Pro/Life Support System Join Date: Dec 1999 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 4,041	whoa whoa whoa... pull the mis information bus over to the side of the road and come out with your hands up! Raid 5 is "so much better" than RAID 0? Explain that one to me!? RAID 5 is SLOW.. wicked slow on write times, and terribly intensive on your controler cards ram, if it doesnt have ram.. then the write speed will be about where a single drive would be and you will have terrible CPU usage. Better as in redundant? Yep I will give you that... But speed HELLLLL NOOOO __________________ Joe - I only take this hat off for one thing... ProCooling archive curator and dusty skeleton.

03-19-2002, 10:25 PM	#45
Butcher Thermophile Join Date: May 2001 Location: UK Posts: 1,064	If RAID 5 is important enough to you then you can afford SCSI. If not then put up with RAID 0. Frankly IDE RAID is pretty pointless - the seek time is the killer on desktop disk speed and RAID of any flavour does nothing to improve seeks. The only way to improve them is to buy a faster disk. SCSI anyone? __________________ Once upon a time, in a land far far away...

03-19-2002, 11:21 PM	#48
Joe The Pro/Life Support System Join Date: Dec 1999 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 4,041	just like all the raid versions.. there are specific uses for all them. RAID5 is good for stuff that is mainly read time ( IE: web servers, etc...) But it should not be used in DB servers as the Read/Write lag kills performance. How are you getting stats on Raid5 that says its write speed is just slightly slower then 0? On a high end SCSI card with megs of ram... Yep thats right. On an IDE card with no ram and no real hardware layer interface ( Most promise cards are all software level)... They will/would SUCK at RAID 5 simply cause there is NO write cache on the car. 1/0 and RAID 3 are favorites for people who have serious Read/Write access and want redundancy. Duplexing is of course the best of all but you have a 50% loss of storrage space. RAID 3 on a nice SCSI card is VERY nice, since you can put all the parity data on one specific drive and have it on its own SCSI channel. that way you dont have to wait for writing parity data to the same platters you are writing your real data on. Jas, I am not a knowitall... I just have worked on RAID systems in professional settings for roughly 10 years. I am the Anti-RAID5 guy after I have seen how it has screwed up the speed of many DB's and file servers. Redundancy is nice, but on a home PC should not come at the cost of performance. __________________ Joe - I only take this hat off for one thing... ProCooling archive curator and dusty skeleton.

03-20-2002, 12:22 AM	#50
Jason711 Cooling Neophyte Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Florida Posts: 59	ok, ill take a bow from this one.. although, they sell ide cards that have cache on them. i know ide is no where near SCSI in terms of performance. i just think its being knocked too hard. most ppl cannot afford SCSI. so ide raid is the best it can get.

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