Question

Question about SATA

Asked by: mkline71

I have a system with a 865PERLK Motherboard. It has two onboard SATA ports, and I have placed two raid controllers on it a Promise SATA150 TX4 and a Promise SATAII TX4. I have five 250 GB Western Digital drives, four on the SATA150 TX4 and one on the onboard. I also have a 120 GB Western Digital on the SATAII TX4. I also have a 74GB Western Digital raptor drive. Should I place my raptor on the SATAII TX4 to take advantage of the Tagged Command Queuing, or should I place it on the onboard controller, so that I am not fighting for throughput on the PCI bus, which is capped at 133MB and must also support the other drives on controllers. I am presuming that the onboard SATA ports are not tied into the PCI bus.

 
I realize a there are better solutions to store data, but I want to know how to best configure the equipment I already have.

Thanks
Mike

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Asked On
2005-01-19 at 11:50:55ID21280780
Tags

sata

,

pci

,

promise

Topic

General Computer Systems

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: CallandorPosted on 2005-01-20 at 07:19:33ID: 13093690

You should make your decision independent of the SATA theoretical 150Mb/sec throughput rating.  Most drives can barely maintain 80Mb/sec, so the maximum bus speed is not really a factor.  TCQ may make a difference in optimizing head seeks, so that sounds like a better approach.

 

by: kode99Posted on 2005-01-20 at 21:31:34ID: 13100340

Those Promise card's are not RAID, just SATA controllers.  The mothboard does do RAID1 so if you did want to mirror something you could do it there.  Hardware RAID will use less of your CPU and likely perform a bit better than a mirror through the OS on the promise cards.

The onboard SATA most likely is tied to the same PCI bus.  Intel did not have much data online but I beleive that to be the case.

Depening on what you are doing with this system the PCI bus may not be the bottleneck anyway.  Same applies to the SATA access.

 

by: mkline71Posted on 2005-01-26 at 05:55:00ID: 13141793

Callandor, I do realize that drives are not anywhere near reaching the maximum throughput of 150 MB/sec of the SATA 1.0 spec, however I was concerned that now that I was moving up to 5 or more drives on the PCI bus, together they might be impeded by the 133 limit on the PCI. The PC is occasionally put into situations where I am moving data across the drives, and people are pulling data from the drives through a gigabit line. Obviously the gigabit by itself would not cause a PCI bottleneck, but when I move data at the same time I am concerned it will max out the throughput.
 
Also, kode99 you are correct they are not RAID cards. I was looking at Promise S150 TX4 and got them mixed up.

According to this site: http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/865pe/index.htm
It would appear that the onboard SATA is separate from the PCI, but I am still looking for a definitive answer from intel.

If it turns out that the onboard SATA is tied into the PCI like kode99 suggested, then I will move the raptor to the controller card.

Thanks
Mike

 

by: kode99Posted on 2005-01-26 at 11:10:01ID: 13145432

Hmm I think you are right,  I found this - http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/Why_RAID.pdf,  which on the last page says 'Industries first desktop RAID controller integrated directly into the chipset'.  That would lead me to believe it does not ride the PCI bus. The diagram in your link looked that way as well.  My bad for not reading the specs close enough.

The Raptor drive I believe has a sustained transfer rate up around 74 MB/s,  regular 7200 RPM drives are more in the area of 65 MB/sec.  So if you are moving big hunks of data around locally your PCI may not be getting hit as hard as you may think.  With the number of drives you have you probably can max out the PCI bus.

Ultimately I think you would want to do some testing to know how much impact your local data transfers are having on the LAN side access.  Likely if you keep it to one transfer at a time the effect would be minimal.

After all the specifications, as we all know,  are sometime a bit optimistic compared to real world performance.

 

by: mkline71Posted on 2005-01-26 at 11:38:27ID: 13145667

You are right, that leads me to believe it is independent as well. Good answer, thanks!

I will be doing some LAN testing, unfortunately I get hit with requests that are several GBs, from as many as a dozen users at a time.

And yes, I wish we got anywhere near what the specifications said we could.

This whole problem will go away once I move to PCI-X and raid 5. Again, good find on the RAID being independently tied directly to the chipset. Thanks!

Mike

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