SATA 2 , when to expect???

[honsbeek2]

Hi ,

Does anyone now anything about the SATA2 drives???
Whats the difference with SATA and when should we expect drives
from the SEAGATE company ???

Any help would be appreciated

Ralph

 

[sh1ft3d]

Don't believe all the hype behind SATA2. The most notable improvement from SATA to SATA2 is the increased bandwidth from 150MB/s to 300MB/s, but today's hard drives don't even use all of the 150MB/s bandwidth of regular SATA (except maybe in rare bursts) so with that added bandwidth I doubt SATA2 drives will be tapping much into that resource - maybe future hard drives will be able to take more advantage of the added bandwidth (kinda like how PCI-E x16 gives more bandwidth than really needed). Hard drives are, and probably will be for a long time, limited in performance by it's spindle/rotational speed.

As far as the other feature of SATA2 (which is also on some regular SATA drives), NCQ (native command queing), this doesn't seem to have a huge impact and in some benchmarks having NCQ turned on actually hurt performance alittle. It looks like NCQ is suited more for the business environment where multiple users are polling data from the same drive that are scattered in various areas of the platters.

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In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.

 

[honsbeek2]

How can I see if my drive has its NCQ on or off???

thanks
Ralph

 

[jammydodger]

Depends on your chipset, the only chipset I know of that supports NCQ is intels ICH6, the ICH6 only come with 915/925 boards as far as im aware.

 

[Codesmith]

Many SATA 150 drives also have NCQ.
There is also Command Queuing which is different?

You are not going to see any performance difference because of the move from SATA to SATA II.

Its the same as UDMA. It went from 33, to 66, to 100, to 133. There are still no drive's able to reach 100 let alone 133.

The new versions were released far in advance of any drive fast enough to take advantage of them.

Except for western digital and its Raptor the industry seems more focused on Capacity than speed. They even stopped making the < 1" drives smaller and are now focusing on capacity.

Most of the speed gain we have seen are a byproduct of the industries quest for greater and greater capacity while lowering costs.

Don't expect any huge leaps forwars, performance wise gains are going to me made at the pace of a slow creep.

 

[jammydodger]

The only drives I know of that support NCQ are Maxtors new hard drive range and the seagate 7200.7's. But as I said before this is no use if your chipset doesnt support it.