Looking to improved hard drive performance, should I add a PCI SATA card?
I have a bunch of workstations at my work that have already had a memory upgrade and the processor is fine. The only thing that's holdling a lot of these PCs back is the fact that they have ATA100 or ATA133 IDE hard drives. The PCs that have the IDE drives don't have any SATA connectors on the board so I would have to then go to the PCI bus for help. I started reading up on the PCI speeds and the machines that i'm dealing with are mostly 33MHz. I looked around for PCI SATA cards and I realized that they don't make PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) because the PCI bus isn't fast enough, only PCI-Xpress will handle SATA II.
Since the PCI bus is only 33MHz, that means that the peak transfer speed is 133MB/s... which is the same speed as an IDE Ultra ATA133 hard drive. So... even though both seem to be the same speed on paper is it faster to run a PCI SATA card or keep the onboard IDE ATA133?
In my case, the hard drives in these PCs are only ATA100 drives so the PCI 33MHz speed (133MB/s) speed would be faster than the ATA100 drive, so I'm going to try the PCI SATA card and SATA drive and see how that works.
Since the PCI bus is only 33MHz, that means that the peak transfer speed is 133MB/s... which is the same speed as an IDE Ultra ATA133 hard drive. So... even though both seem to be the same speed on paper is it faster to run a PCI SATA card or keep the onboard IDE ATA133?
In my case, the hard drives in these PCs are only ATA100 drives so the PCI 33MHz speed (133MB/s) speed would be faster than the ATA100 drive, so I'm going to try the PCI SATA card and SATA drive and see how that works.
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To get back to "jdietrich" about his question on what the PCs current have for hardware:
One of the PCs (Dimension 4500) has a Maxtor D740X-6L IDE hard drive. Below is a site that has its stats:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=951
One of the PCs (Dimension 4500) has a Maxtor D740X-6L IDE hard drive. Below is a site that has its stats:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=951
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sounds like it's worth a shot! I'll look around for IDE controllers and ATA133 drives and see if I can set this up in a test box. Thanks for the help!
Please let me know how it works. It's a little more work setting up the raid array and driver for the install, but it should offer quite an improvement. With multiple caches and multiple controllers (one per drive) the reads/writes will alternate and increase performance significantly.
JD
JD
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