Re: SATA Hard Drive for integrated RAID controller

Hi!

> On the Precision 670 Workstation, there's an integrated SATA 1.5 RAID
> controller that the system spec says can take SATA-150, 500GB drives.
> Today's 500GHz drives are SATA-300 interface.

> The bus is backward compatible, yes?

Yes. The connectors are exactly the same, both for power and data. In
theory, a SATA 300 (unofficially and to the dismay of the standards body
behind SATA, these are sometimes called a "SATA-II" device) should
automatically negotiate the best rate available to the controller. But in
reality, some chipsets (particularly the VIA VT8237) have bugs and won't
detect a SATA-II device unless you set a jumper to force the device to use
the 1.5 gigabit rate. If your drive doesn't show, check the jumpers.

> How fast can a 500GB drive do sustained transfers anyway?

It depends upon the drive. Some are faster than others. Most perform
anywhere from 30-70 megabytes/second. What you actually get will vary,
especially if the drive can meet your request from its onboard cache memory.
Your operating system will also do some caching.

So far almost all drives still only offer performance falling comfortably
into the realm of what PATA/133 is capable of.

William

Hi!

> So you don't think the onboard SATA-150 controller will
> be too much of a bottleneck for a modern 500GB SATA-300
> drive from Seagate or WD?

Nope, I think it will work fine. And I don't think you'll see that
much of a performance difference. The limiting factor here will be the
drive mechanism and how fast it can hand the data over.

William