by NicksFXHouse » Mon Oct 02, 2006 6:45 pm
SATA, SATA2, SATA3.... = marketing scam
No different than ATA, ATA100, ATA133, SATA150 and SATA300... all bullsugar
The speed of the drive in access time based on rotation and the data speed between the buffer and the disk is what makes a hard drive. In example, the WD Raptor has a buffer to disk spec of 84MB/s. That is what will show up on a hard drive benchmark but that is not the speed of the disk any more than SATA150 means you bet 150MB/s transfer from equal drives. The rule of thumb is divide it by EIGHT for the real world performance and then add in a percentage for faster rotation and access time
This should be an eye opener... here is the real world base speed of hard drives:
ATA = 7MB/s
ATA100 = 12.5MB/s
ATA133 = 17MB/s
SATA150 = 18.75MB/s
SATA300 = 38MB/s (NOTE: This is only true if the buffer to disk is equal to or greater than 75MB/s, most of them are NOT and are rated @ 55-60MB/s)
SCSI Drives are the only drives rated in a true MB/s. that is why a good SCSI raid controller and drive setup can cost thousands of dollars.
A RAID array using 2 WD Raptors on a good controller maxes @ a true 76MB/s transfer rate ASSUMING the I/O receiving the information is greater than or equal to the speed of the Raptor array (the burst and what a benchmark shows is NOT the true, real world speed of the drives or the array)
The hard drive companies have gone to great lengths to place marketing labels on the industry.
A single SATA150 WD Raptor is faster than a typical SATA300 drive by quite a bit.