SATA - Worth it ?

seanos

Hello,

Getting few New HD's ...
Curious if SATA is worth it, is the performance increase good ?

Was planning on getting
Western Digital Raptor 74GB S-ATA 8MB cache 10000RPM
as main disk, then two other SATA disks
probably :
Western Digital Caviar 160GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM
or
Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM

The hitachi has 8.5ms access, as opposed to WD's 8.9ms [difference is neglidgable as far as i can tell].
Hitachi is also cheaper - but I'm curious of quality of their drives.

Anyway, I'll RAID the two latter ones [unsure which RAID I'll go for...]

As for controller cards was thinking of :
HighPoint RocketRAID 1640 Serial ATA 4 channels RAID 5 adapter

Any suggestions be appriciated - especially models/manufacturers ...

Rgds,

Sean

leeroybrown

At the moment the Hitachi is the StorageReview 'daddy':
http://storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=LeaderBoard
(StorageReview is always right about what the best disks are)

As someone who has two WD1200JB's I'd always recommend the current range of WD Special Edition drives but the Hitachi will have the same performance while making a lot less noise.

slartibardfast

I can't say a single Raptor is a good idea, they're best in raid0's anything else really defeats the point of 10,000 rpm disks in a desktop. They are wildly fast and should only come in pairs

silverside

I have had a lot of trouble trying to fix a SATA drive when it went wrong. Just be aware that it is a new technology and you may have problems to do with driver compatibility etc.

I suppose it is a trade off of how much you want the speed increase in RAID versus how much time you can risk fixing it up if it does go wrong.

On my own experience I would avoid Biostar and Via

silverside

As regards disks: The Samsung spinpoint 160GB is quiet,fast. I like it.

subway_ie

Originally posted by silverside
As regards disks: The Samsung spinpoint 160GB is quiet,fast. I like it.

I just bought one from JES, they've gone down to €85 now. Only thing is, I don't have my SATA motherboard to use it on yet.

ARGINITE

SATA is well worth it I think I noticed a bg difference between my new SATA drive and my old hdd.

Dempsey

Buying a SATA controller for single drive -- dont bother, performance increase is feck all, smaller cables for better airflow, only use SATA and single drive is the SATA controller is onboard.

Buying a SATA controller for RAID 5 and WD Raptors -- YES YES , the raptors are the only drives that is a league above any other SATA/IDE drive in terms of performance. All IDE and their SATA equivalents performance more or less the same. No significant increase in performance

Buying a SATA controller for RAID and any SATA drive -- Again it is worth it. Loading time will improve significantly over single drives and encoding is faster.

Hitachi's are actually the best drives out there at the moment. They outproform others in most tests, quiet and reliable. I have always bought WD but I have heard great things about Hitachi's. Samsung Spinpoints are very good aswell equal to the WD if not slightly better.

I'd recommend any SATA drives in RAID over a single 74Gb raptor. Better value for money and higher transfer rates. Better Latency on a Raptor any day of the week though
You can get a 36Gb Raptor and a 120Gb SATA drive for the price of one 74Gb raptor