Recommend a SATA cable configuration?

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torrey.smith

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OK, so my current impression is that the maximum number of internal SATA headers on a typical gaming mobo is 6. If I was to mount 6 HDDs and 2 optical drives, what would be the best configuration?

My first thought is that letting the optical drives each share a cable with one of the HDDs, so that duplicating an optical disk could go at full speed, would be the way to go.

Would this screw up a RAID 01/10/5 setup by having 2 out of 6 HDDs sharing SATA cables?

Am I being a unrealistic trying to go with 6 HDDs?

Thoughts?

As always, thanks everybody for the input!
 
Why do I need such a system? Well, the first reason could be part of an attempt to compensate for certain physical shortcomings.

The other reason is that I work on files which average about 1 GB and require constant saving. My hope is that this would go faster with 6 HDDs as opposed to 4.

You make a good point!
 
torrey.smith said:
The other reason is that I work on files which average about 1 GB and require constant saving. My hope is that this would go faster with 6 HDDs as opposed to 4.
Click to expand...
Depending on the access pattern of these files, a set of source and destination disks may be a smart investment. If only small parts of these files are updated during each save process, it may well be that faster drives (lower access time) not more drives is a better choice.
 
torrey.smith said:
The other reason is that I work on files which average about 1 GB and require constant saving. My hope is that this would go faster with 6 HDDs as opposed to 4.
Click to expand...

drizzt81 said:
Depending on the access pattern of these files, a set of source and destination disks may be a smart investment. If only small parts of these files are updated during each save process, it may well be that faster drives (lower access time) not more drives is a better choice.
Click to expand...

Agreed. What program is this? Is the whole file re-written each time? Do you tend to save multiple copies of a given file, or not? Are you reading from one file and writing to another?
 
My chief program is SolidWorks. I'm not sure what portion of the files are re-written, but my changes are incremental. My knowledge here is limited, though.
 
I can't find any good material on how much disk I/O Solidworks does, either. SPEC 2005 mentions that a Samsung 80GB drive is 2.59 times as fast as their reference 40GB disk, but that tells me approximately nothing in terms of new disks. For example, they mention that it takes them 122 seconds, but whether most of that time is seeking, calculating, or writing to disk there's no telling.

It may be possible to benchmark different I/O strategies using iozone -X and -Y. I don't know if these options work on Windows; perhaps you could play with filemon to recreate a telemetry file for iozone to simulate. Even watching output of filemon while saving an output file would be informative; does it do large writes? How many? Sequentially or out-of-order? Does it do reads at the same time, or is all the data coming from main memory?
 
torrey.smith said:
OK, so my current impression is that the maximum number of internal SATA headers on a typical gaming mobo is 6. If I was to mount 6 HDDs and 2 optical drives, what would be the best configuration?

My first thought is that letting the optical drives each share a cable with one of the HDDs, so that duplicating an optical disk could go at full speed, would be the way to go.

Would this screw up a RAID 01/10/5 setup by having 2 out of 6 HDDs sharing SATA cables?

Am I being a unrealistic trying to go with 6 HDDs?

Thoughts?

As always, thanks everybody for the input!
Click to expand...

You can't share a SATA connection. So if there's 6 SATA ports, you can only use 6 SATA devices.

If you want more, get a SATA controller.
 
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