HHD Question (1 Viewer)

[JamesED]

Hey guys, I'm about to order the components for building my first computer, but I had one question about HHD. What exactly is SATA 3.0gb/s versus just Serial ATA 150. I haven't found much infomation about how to tell if I can use all the extra components of SATA 3.0gb/s.

My motherboard choice will be probably be eVGA's Nforce 4 SLI board, which lists SATA II support.

Thanks for clearing this up for me.

 

[JamesED]

If you guys were curious, here's my build. It's a $1200 system. I'll be playing games too, hence the 7800 GT and the low latency ram.


I'm also going to order a battery back up. I'm looking for under $100 shipped. How does this APC one look?

APC Back-UPS BE725BB 725VA 450W UPS - Retail

 

[SethH]

That motherboard does support 3.0Gbps SATA. I would definitely buy an SATA drive that also has this capability since there's not much, if any, price difference. You might also consider getting two 120GB or 160GB drives instead of the single 250GB and running a raid-0 setup which will be faster (the motherboard has the software built-in to do this, as well as raid-1).

Oh, and the difference between the two standards (SATA 150 vs SATA 3.0Gbps) is mostly speed. The newer standard can, in theory, operate at twice the bandwidth of the old standard. There are also a few other things in the standard that supposedly make a difference such as native command queing (NCQ).

 

[Christ Reynolds]

it should be noted that niether drive will even be fast enough to reach the slower speed. it's just what the specification allows for.

go for the sata II (sata 3.0 Gbps), the cost between I and II are minimal if any, and II has some additional benefits as seth said.

CJ

 

[Ken Chan]

There is no SATA II (anymore)

FWIW, 3.0Gbps is twice as fast as 150MB/s. At first glance, that might seem obvious, unless you know how many bits there are in a byte. 150MB/s SATA is 1.5Gbps, and SATA (like many serial protocols) encodes 8 bits of data into 10 over the wire. So the math all just works out. The renaming may have been because (a) smaller numbers are easier to digest; and/or (b) "giga" sounds faster.

But as Christ points out, no (single) drive is near 150MB/s. A RAID-0 as suggested by Seth would be faster (sustained transfer) but you are much more vulnerable to data loss. If either drive goes, you're hosed. So aside from having a good backup regardless, RAID-0 may not be appropriate for some uses.

 

[JamesED]

For the same price, I could get to Hitachi 80GB drives.

I'm reading into the Raid 0 array. Now this would give me 160gb of space correct? Data loss isn't too big of a concern, I use two hard drives in my current computer for storage (WD 120gb and 160gb). Since I'd want gaming performance, is the Raid 0 appropriate for me?

 

[Tekara]

yeah, hard drives are a big bottleneck in data transfers. The gain from using a raid array in gaiming would be reduced load times.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

raid 0 isnt actually raid, because the R in raid stands for redundancy, and there is none with raid 0. so it's actually aid (array of independent/inexpensive disks), but everyone calls it raid.

now for the non-useless part of my post. if data loss is not a primary concern to you, then you would probably benefit from a raid 0 array. two 80 GB disks in a raid 0 array will give you one large 160 GB "drive" with theoretical performance of twice the normal drive speed. but you'll never reach that speed. as long as you regularly back up what you need from the drive (save states, updates), i think you'd benefit from raid 0. but make sure to back up any critical data. by having two drives, you are doubling the chances you will have a drive failure. and as ken said, once you lose either drive, you lose all the data on the array.

CJ

 

[SethH]

The reason I suggested raid-0 is because you specifically mentioned gaming. As others have correctly pointed out, there is some danger in this from a data loss standpoint. Another option, and this is what I personally do, is to use the two drives to create a RAID-0+1. You can allot part of each drive to a raid-0 array to play games and for other programs that will benefit from the speed (you'll want your swap disk for virtual memory on this drive too). The rest of the drive is in a raid-1 array which is mirroring.

If you did this with 2 80GB drives you could allot 60GB of each drive to raid-0 which would give you a 120GB logical drive. The other 20GB of each drive would be mirrored and give you a 20GB drive. Total you would have 140GB, 20GB of which would be more secure from data loss/hard drive failure.

The software to do all this is built-in to the chipset on your board.