SATA question

[gwilks98]

I want to upgrade to a SATA drive. (I'm tired of running off of PATA 20 and 60 gig drives.)

New Egg's got some 250 giggers out there that are priced nicely, but some are SATA 150, some are 3.0Gb/s.

How can I tell which one my mobo supports? link to my mobo (http://developer.intel.com/products/motherboard/d865gbf/index.htm)

Is the faster speed drive backwards compatible if my board isn't modern enough?

Does the question even matter since the rest of the board bottlenecks at 133Mb/s?

[seqiro]

Both should work, they will just operate at the speed your motherboard can handle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-ATA

[DarkFury]

I want to upgrade to a SATA drive. (I'm tired of running off of PATA 20 and 60 gig drives.)

New Egg's got some 250 giggers out there that are priced nicely, but some are SATA 150, some are 3.0Gb/s.

How can I tell which one my mobo supports? link to my mobo (http://developer.intel.com/products/motherboard/d865gbf/index.htm)

Is the faster speed drive backwards compatible if my board isn't modern enough?

Does the question even matter since the rest of the board bottlenecks at 133Mb/s?

Pretty much, that is an older motherboard and surely it is SATA 150. SATA 3.0Gb/s is a much newer standard that wasn't even out when your board was designed.

Digging further on that link you provided to your motherboard, I found this document that had the specs of your mobo...
ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/bf/C3263401.pdf


In it it had the following paragraph (on page 40)



1.8.4.2 Serial ATA Interfaces
The ICH5’s Serial ATA controller offers two independent Serial ATA ports with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 150 MB/s per port. One device can be installed on each port for a maximum of two Serial ATA devices. A point-to-point interface is used for host to device connections, unlike Parallel ATA IDE which supports a master/slave configuration and two devices per channel.

For compatibility, the underlying Serial ATA functionality is transparent to the operating system. The Serial ATA controller can operate in both legacy and native modes. In legacy mode, standard IDE I/O and IRQ resources are assigned (IRQ 14 and 15). In Native mode, standard PCI resource steering is used. Native mode is the preferred mode for configurations using the Windows XP and Windows 2000 operating systems.

This confirms that you have a SATA 150 compliant mobo... now that being said, as Sequiro mentioned above, you won't be able to take advantage of the speed of the faster SATA drive, however if you plan to migrate it to a newer system in the future, then it might be worth the extra expense. If not, then the SATA 150 is still plenty fast for now.

[gwilks98]

Thanks guys. How hot do these things run? Am I going to need to buy additional cooling? (It probably won't be used for video editing at first; mostly games and MP3's.

[johnnymk]

Do any of these SATA drives even go as high as they are advertised? I have read of rates approaching 80 MB per second, but haven't read of drives higher than that.

I don't think that the 15K SCSI drives go that fast.

[DarkFury]

Thanks guys. How hot do these things run? Am I going to need to buy additional cooling? (It probably won't be used for video editing at first; mostly games and MP3's.
Heat shouldn't be much of a problem... unless you already got heat issues in your case.

But if you are worried about heat, just get a drive bay cooler... those work wonders. (I have a Vantec cooler on my SATA Raptor... and it drops the temps from 37 C down to 28 C when I am playing games online.)

[InfiniteNothing]

Do any of these SATA drives even go as high as they are advertised? I have read of rates approaching 80 MB per second, but haven't read of drives higher than that.

I don't think that the 15K SCSI drives go that fast.
The hard drive's cache may run that fast. If you were swapping data into and out of the cache I can see how it might help you a bit.

[shocky123]

80MB/s isnt achievable over the current SATA drives. (save the 15K SAS drives that Seagate has)

72MB/s is about the highest you'll see in any sustained read/write on an SATA drive. That would be only on the 10K Raptor drives. However, I have seen 68-70MB/s on some of the more expensive 7200rpm SATA drives during sustained read/writes.

The 15K SAS drive that Seagate just announced is supposedly capable of 125MB/s sustained, though I havent seen any definitive benchmarks that support that.

Temps, I think most run around 35-40C?? but the drives dont use a ton of power usually, and that's where you should start looking if you're concerned about heat generation inside your box. Recall that your cpu probably radiates 70W, and your graphics card may do double or triple that easily, so if you want to reduce the heat in your case, start with those first. The (dont quote me on this..) ~10-15W that the hard drive is pumping out is miniscule when compared with your 150W Oven (graphics card).

~Kyle