any benefit with sata II?

[peterhoang2002]

im planning on buying the hitachi 7k250 160gb drive which has the new sata II. my question is does it really have any real world performance boost over SATA. for example, will it load games or anything else faster?

also, my dfi lanparty ut nf4 ultra-d says it supports SATA 3.0 Gb/s but it doesnt say anything about sata II. does anyone know if it will recognize my drive as being sata II?

 

[brachy33]

You might see data bursts that might utilize the bandwidth of SATA II, but I believe that the idea with SATA II is to eventually allow more than one drive on a single channel. Also, I think the latest reports (forgive me, I don't feel like referencing any of this right now) state that even SATA (non II version) will only see sustained transfer rates of nothing more than 80 - 100Mb/s. Data bursts on SATA can see ~150Mb/s.

Anyone else have another theories or ideas or crazy shmazy benchmarks to say otherwise?

B22

 

[ashmedai]

SATA II has some very good applications, but as far as single-drive internal "performance" (without further clarification to the contrary) all you're doing is comparing the same device, with extra bandwidth, when it already had significantly more than it needed to start with.

 

[DougLite]

You might see data bursts that might utilize the bandwidth of SATA II, but I believe that the idea with SATA II is to eventually allow more than one drive on a single channel. Also, I think the latest reports (forgive me, I don't feel like referencing any of this right now) state that even SATA (non II version) will only see sustained transfer rates of nothing more than 80 - 100Mb/s. Data bursts on SATA can see ~150Mb/s.

Anyone else have another theories or ideas or crazy shmazy benchmarks to say otherwise?

B22

You're not dreamin about port multipliers: http://www.sata-io.org/portmultiplier.asp When they hit the street, mobo PCB space for storage will no longer be a problem, as you will be able to hook up to 15 drivs to one port. Imagine 60 drive hooked to your motherboard to 4 ports that take up the same PCB space as one PATA port. A huge boon to mobo makers, etc. Of course, with 15 drives to a port, 3 gbps transfer gets eaten up pretty quick - They are already cooking 6 gbps transfer as well.

There are no SATA drives capable of delivering sustained transfers of over 80MB/sec right now. Even in the SCSI world, Maxtor's mighty Atlas 15K II falls just short of 100MB/sec in its fastest outer zones. However, with multiple dirves per port, you can saturate that bus pretty quickly. I'm excited to see what comes of this, especially for those of us who want large RAIDs and cable management