New PATA Hard Drive speed?

[TugBoat]

I just installed a Seagate Ultra PATA 100 (7200.8 ) 400GB drive and it's got me scratching my head. A couple months ago I installed 2 Seagate 250GB SATA (7200.8 ) drives connected to a SeriTek SATA card. I get about 65MB/s with the SATA drives (105MB/s with a SATA RAID0 partition spanning both buses). I thought this was about normal. My 3 year old PATA Western Digitals gave me 45-50MB/s on the onboard ATA 100 bus (85-90MB/s with a PATA RAID0 partition spanning both ATA buses). I thought this was normal.

So....
I put this 400giger on the ATA 100 bus and Xbench 1.2 says 70-80MB/s
WTF? I'm having a hard time believing this. It appears to be right though. So, anyone else experience something like this? Onboard PATA kicking SATAs butt? If this holds true, I'm ordering another 400giger tomorrow

[terryj]

Tug, I'm suprised you bought a Seagate drive....
I've had nothing but bad luck with Seagate drives,
granted mine were in the 60GB to 160 GB range.

Does WD make a 400GB drive?

[jagabo]

The speed at which the drives can read data off the platters is still slower than the PATA/SATA interfaces. Your new drive probably has higher density platters than the older ones, hence it can read data off them faster.

[TugBoat]

Ha!
See, no matter what, someone else has probably had a different experience. Well, I did a lot of research before buying all Seagate drives and most people said Seagate was one of the best. They do have the longest warranty, 5 years.

Personally, I've never had a 3.5" drive fail, even Maxtors and Deathstars. Granted, the oldest one is the 80MB SCSI that came in a IIsi and the largest Maxtor is 160GB. Most of the old ones are less than 20GB. But, I can't seem to keep a 2.5 inch drive (larger than 10GB) for more than 14-24 months.

So, after three 2.5 inch drives, in three separate Notebooks, failed within six months of each other, I bought all Seagates. They do have a 5 year warranty. Now I have a total of 6 Seagate drives and I'm ordering number seven today. I guess time will tell. The new 400GBer was on special for $170 and it totally Kicks A$$!

I guess the denser platter thing makes sense, but still, the SATAs are rated at 1.5GB/s and are the same model (7200.8 ) verses the PATAs 100MB/s

Now I'm wondering. The other PATA bus on this PM G4 is an ATA66 which is less than the 70-80MB/s that I'm getting on the ATA100 bus. Could this possibly screw up a RAID0 using both the ATA100 and ATA66 buses

[jagabo]

I guess the denser platter thing makes sense, but still, the SATAs are rated at 1.5GB/s and are the same model (7200.8 ) verses the PATAs 100MB/s :!:

And sticking a big fat fire hose on your bathroom faucet won't make the water come out faster.

[terryj]

Ha!
guess time will tell. The new 400GBer was on special for $170 and it totally Kicks A$$!

was that before or after mail in rebate?

[TugBoat]

Damn.
They've already gone back up. $250 now.
http://dealmac.com/deals/Seagate-Barracuda-400-GB-IDE-Internal-Hard-Drives-from-150/116009.html
No rebate, and my receipt, dated 4/17, says it was a straight $169.99.
Back to watching and waiting....

[oldandinthe way]

For the same speed drive ,parallel interfaces are intrinsically faster (multiple bits transfered at once rather than a single bit). Drive makers use on drive buffering to help mask the slower transfer rate of serial interfaces. Apparently your SATA drives may not have sufficient buffering to handle your data as organized on the disk at the same performance as a parallel interface.

As for specs, they are only meaningful if you know what is being measured and how. When was the last time your printer actually ran at its rated speed.

[jagabo]

For the same speed drive ,parallel interfaces are intrinsically faster

That is not the case. SATA, especially the latest spec, is faster than PATA. But the speed at which drives can read data off the platters is still the limiting factor for sustained throughput.