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Question about SATA and controller cards

E

erehwon6811

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2004
Messages
493
I'm looking add in another hard drive and all my ata interfaces are used. So I have to use SATA. I have a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 motherboard. Unfortunately, I think it only has support for the older SATA. I'm looking at the Seagate Barracuda (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. My question is can I use that drive with my motherboard? Also are there any cheap SATA cards that I could use that would take advantage of the drive's SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface? I really don't want to spend alot since I might be getting this as a Christmas present. The main thing this card is going to be storing is video from my pvr150 tuner card.
 
Yeah those drives will work just fine, but you won't get any of the advantages of SATAII, they'll be running in SATAI mode pretty much to say. I don't think your motherboard controller is going to max out those drives at least in a RAID 5 setup. Raid 0 probably not either. Biggest loss would be NCQ. If you're going for chaep i would simply stick with the onboard raid.
 
For the moment, I don't plan on doing raid. I'm just looking at getting a big drive for video storage. I might do a raid later when I get some more money. I've done much research on hard drive technology, what is NCQ?
 
Well if you don't plan on doing raid then you aren't going to notice a difference between SATAII or SATAI. NCQ (Native Command Queing) helps a little bit with speed, just google it for more info. For storing large videos and stuff that should work just fine, unless you're editing them or doing something hard drive intensive you don't need that much speed. It is a pain to copy a couple 100gigs from drive to drive once and a while but you shouldn't be doing that all that often.

I just got done building a 1.5tb RAID5 array with 4 500gig drives and filled it up in a couple of weeks. You'll want to make sure you have an upgrade plan for later in the future, if you're going to do raid later on make sure all the drives are the same size and model. I'm working on getting another 8 drives for my array to get it up to 5.5tbs just wasn't planning on doing it so soon, finding a case to hold 12+ hard drives and other stuff isn't easy but the guys around here seem to like the CM Stacker cases so i'm thinking of going with that, as my current case can't hold anymore drives.
 
Video Storage? Neither NCQ nor 3.0 gbps support will be of any value. NCQ only helps when queue depths get to 2 or more, as there must be multiple requests outstanding before you can reorder them ;) Also, NCQ exacts an overhead to be on, reducing throughput under lighter loads that make up the vast majority of access on the desktop. As for 3.0gbps, it will only help transfers from the buffer to the system/memory. Video transfer performance will be limited by the mechanical transfer performance of the physical disk media.

Having said that, the 320GB Barracuda is an excellent choice. It's 160GB platters will deliver excellent transfer performance and be quite responsive in loading your videos. However, pick it up from ZZF instead of Newegg, even if it's a few bucks extra. ZZF does a better job of packing the drives, and doing reduces the chance of the drive failing within the first year or so.
 
Your nForce3 board/chipset could have some problems with Maxtor SATA 3.0 Gb/s drives. I had some issues with a similar board. Jumpering the drives to SATA 1.5 Gb/s didn't help. Maxtor sent me some new firmware to try, but I haven't done so yet -- I just used the drives elsewhere in the meanwhile.
 
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