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  1. Hi all,

    I'm looking to buy a new system and I'm wondering about the new serial ATA drives. I am planning to get either the MSI 875P NEO-FIS2R ($176 from pricewatch.com) or the MSI 865PE NEO2-MIS2R ($152 from pricewatch) which both have the onboard RAID which can either go with IDE or SATA.

    My question is based on info I've read that says the current SATA 150 drives just aren't as fast as they can and will be in the future (600mb/sec) but I'm wondering what is stopping them from achieving this now.

    Is it the MoBo, the HD or the controllers? If it's the hard drives themselves, I will go ahead and set up a RAID with two 40 gig Maxtor IDE 7200rpm drives (I already have one so it would just be another $60). If it's the MoBo, then I might as well live with the current SATA drives today (looking at a 2 120GB Maxtor's for $113 a piece).

    Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated.

    Also, the 875P is only $20 more than the 865PE but Tom's Hardware did a test and the 865PE came out the fastest because of it's over clock ability. Should I go with the older chipset or the newer chipset?


    Thanks in advance,

    Andrew


    Proposed System:

    P4 3.0ghz 800mhz with 512cache ($392)
    Kingston 512MB DDR400 PC-3200 ram ($91)
    Kingwin KT-424 aluminum case ($102)
    RAID 0 hardrives
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  2. I got the i875P chipset and am running RAID0 with 2 SATA 160Gb Seagates. The speed increases I've noticed over IDE especially working with large video and audio files is well worth it. Another advantage I've recently noticed is that your 2 IDE ports are left free for 4 other devices. So I've stacked on an extra IDE 80gb HDD for backup purposes should the RAID die on me plus a DVDROM, CDR Burner & a DVD Burner along with the 2 SATA drives.

    Go for the SATA and the new chipset, it's stable and has established itself nicely. The overclocking on the i865P is negotiable. You're planning on buying a P4 3.0Ghz with DDR400 (run in dual channel) so why would you need to overclock anyway ?
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  3. Member
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    A word of warning: quite a few SATA drives on sale at the moment are NOT true SATA drives. They are just bog standard IDE drives with a SATA interface built in. This of course will give no speed increase as the SATA signal has to converted to IDE for the drive to use it.

    BEWARE.
    What's that burning smell?
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  4. I see no reason for SATA just yet. Most 7,200rpm drives are fine for capturing and the data can only be written to the drive as fast as the CPU can process it.

    About chipsets. The only advantage of the 875P over the 865 is that it has *PAT* technology. But some motherboard manufacturers found out the *PAT* techonology was already built into some of their 865 chipsets, and they just needed a new BIOS to unlock it. I do not know where you can find out which 865 motherboards have this, but if you look in some PC magazines it tells you in the system builder section. You better be quick about it though because Intel have created the 865 V2 where the PAT technology is not unlockable, so buy an unlocked 865 before they run out, or if you have the money just buy an 875.

    I was furious to find out that just weeks of buying my new mobo (the *875 canterwood version*), Abit had released an unlocked *865P springdale version* which meant I could have bought a motherboard with more functions than this one for about £20 less.
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  5. Surefire, I was planning on getting the Maxtor 120GB SATA, is this a true SATA drive? How can you tell?

    Thanks,

    Andrew
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  6. Tekniques,

    What MoBo do you have? Both of these MSI boards supposedly lets you set up Ultra/Serial Raid 0+1 so you could have the best of both worlds. I wonder if this has been tested by anyone.

    Do you have a automated way of a backup or do you just copy important stuff over to your IDE drive?

    Thanks for the advice!

    Andrew
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  7. Pixel, you may have explained why the 865PE is just as good or faster than the 875P. I haven't really looked into the latest CPU technology for a few years, so this slipped by me.

    From Tom's hardware:

    http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030707/index.html

    "The second board from MSI is based on the Intel 865PE chipset, and the only difference between it and its big brother 875P Neo is the PCB layout. Otherwise, the same features are available, such as CSA Gigabit LAN, ICH5 RAID, additional Promise controller for Serial-RAID and Ultra DMA/133 and FireWire.

    A highlight is the MAT technology, which deals solely with the PAT function, although Intel has prohibited manufacturers from using the term "PAT" in connection with the Springdale chipset. Asus, for example, calls the PAT function in the 865PE "HyperPath." In the case of MSI, however, the feature must be activated beforehand in the BIOS (performance mode, ultra Turbo). The board therefore achieves the best performance in the whole test field.

    As is the case with the 875P, the 865PE Neo 2 also offers dynamic overclocking. Priced at just under $170, the board is a reasonably priced offering. The BIOS update, conveniently performed in Windows XP via the Internet, also deserves a mention."


    I wonder if I should just go with the 865PE then? Why not save the $20! Any other boards that I should consider?

    Also, you don't think that the SATA drives at RAID 0 will be noticeably faster than the IDE drives at RAID 0? This was the purpose of my original post. Are you saying that this MoBo setup will not fully utilize the SATA transfer capacity?

    If it's the drives themselves, I will just implement the IDE Raid and wait on the new SATA drives to really outshine the IDE's. The question is will I be able to utilize a 600mb/sec transfer rate in the future with this MoBo?

    Thanks!
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  8. Originally Posted by lavesa
    Pixel, you may have explained why the 865PE is just as good or faster than the 875P. I haven't really looked into the latest CPU technology for a few years, so this slipped by me.

    From Tom's hardware:

    http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030707/index.html

    "The second board from MSI is based on the Intel 865PE chipset, and the only difference between it and its big brother 875P Neo is the PCB layout. Otherwise, the same features are available, such as CSA Gigabit LAN, ICH5 RAID, additional Promise controller for Serial-RAID and Ultra DMA/133 and FireWire.

    A highlight is the MAT technology, which deals solely with the PAT function, although Intel has prohibited manufacturers from using the term "PAT" in connection with the Springdale chipset. Asus, for example, calls the PAT function in the 865PE "HyperPath." In the case of MSI, however, the feature must be activated beforehand in the BIOS (performance mode, ultra Turbo). The board therefore achieves the best performance in the whole test field.

    As is the case with the 875P, the 865PE Neo 2 also offers dynamic overclocking. Priced at just under $170, the board is a reasonably priced offering. The BIOS update, conveniently performed in Windows XP via the Internet, also deserves a mention."


    I wonder if I should just go with the 865PE then? Why not save the $20! Any other boards that I should consider?

    Also, you don't think that the SATA drives at RAID 0 will be noticeably faster than the IDE drives at RAID 0? This was the purpose of my original post. Are you saying that this MoBo setup will not fully utilize the SATA transfer capacity?

    If it's the drives themselves, I will just implement the IDE Raid and wait on the new SATA drives to really outshine the IDE's. The question is will I be able to utilize a 600mb/sec transfer rate in the future with this MoBo?

    Thanks!
    There is an Abit Springdale with the 865PE chipset, which I believe is also unlockable. Basically, most of the 865PE chipsets are unlockable (only the PE, not any variations such as the P), but you are best to check in PC magazines first.

    I am not saying that the SATA drives will not be as fast in a RAID configuration, but I believe you would only see a boost when copying from a SATA HDD to another SATA HDD and most of us only do things like that about once a month when backing up our systems.

    I just think that there is not enough speed or stability to justify spending extra money on a SATA HDD when you could buy a nice big IDE HDD. For video editing purposes IDE is more than fast enough and the SATA isn't going to give a big boost when capturing or encoding or even when ripping DVD's.
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  9. Haven't decided 100% on S-ATA yet.

    I run RAID 0 on 4 Maxtor 30GB IDE drives on the video editing computer, and I'm happy with the speed. I tried a RocketRAID S-ATA setup but had some integration problems that I think were the fault of the Western Digital 10K S-ATA drives.

    The other machine in the house? Well...
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  10. Far too goddamn old now EddyH's Avatar
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    Based purely on circumstantial evidence, i'd say a mix of all three.

    1. Most places where i've seen discs reviewed or for sale with detailed specs, the "internal" transfer rate - ie between disc surface and RAM buffer - is only just kissing the 100mb/s mark (significant because thats a common burst ATA cable speed). That's for 7200rpm, 120-180gb models anyway. 10 and 15k ones, well, do the maths

    2. The serial ATA hardware is new and only just up and running... might take a while before you see chipsets that'll go much over 150mb/s (stick with firewire for now? )

    3. There's also the question of transfer speed to/from the actual mobo, data bus, memory etc. If it's a PCI plug-in card, then 133mb/s shared between all actively transferring drives is a physical limit (with AGP graphics and no other active PCI devices), 266 if your board supports 66mhz. (533 with 64bit, 66mhz? ... is there even 64bit PCI or did i dream that one?). An integrated SATA controller/connector set would be able to go a lot quicker e.g. it may run at the 400 / 533mhz of a modern FSB and be able to communicate with a 64bit width or higher. Heck even if it ran at the 266 of a lower end Athlon board with 32bit it'd be capable of that screaming 500mb/s... on two simultaneous discs anyway.

    Wowch.. what would you use 500mb/s for? (not that it wouldnt be nice - copy CD-sized files almost at the Speed Of Thought). It's for a server, right?

    The future is going to be cool.
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    Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!
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  11. Do you have a automated way of a backup or do you just copy important stuff over to your IDE drive?
    I create image files using Powerquests Drive Image of my system drive with high compression. I have a clean XP image with no programs, just all drivers loaded and another image with all my apps loaded.

    All my data is backed up using the Backup Utility built into XP under "program --> accessories --> system tools --> backup". You can automate the backup through the schedule providing you never turn your PC off I guess but I choose to do a manual back up (incremental, only backs up changes) about once a fortnight, depending on how much work I've done.
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  12. contrarian rallynavvie's Avatar
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    I thought SATA 150 meant 150 mb/s max transfer rates

    RAID: do a search in Off-Topic for a discussion or RAID. RAID 0 is not all that great. I've been there and now use the drives seperately since I never saw enough of a performance increase to warrant the threat of losing all data on both drives if/when a stripe went bad (which has happened to me several times at work). RAID 1 is a better idea, but then only if you need that security. Where RAID 1 really shines is if you have a HDD failure it'll just switch right to the new drive almost without notice.

    I may yet switch to SATA, but for now my 15k RPM SCSI drives are doing the job well enough for me. Rather than blow more money on SATA drives I'd rather add another 18GB SCSI drive to my array. I have PLENTY of storage space on IDE drives so that isn't an issue.

    I've never used MSI boards so I don't know much about them, or Pentium boards at all for that matter. Not that I'd be opposed to owning one, just never had one before.
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  13. Member
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    EddyH wrote:
    2. The serial ATA hardware is new and only just up and running... might take a while before you see chipsets that'll go much over 150mb/s (stick with firewire for now? )
    The regular firewire interface is 400 Mbit/s (50 MB/sec). Even ATA66 is faster. The new Firewire 800 (1394b) is 800 Mbit/s (100 MB/sec).

    I'm a regular user of firewire stuff and I think its great, but for internal storage raid ATA100 or ATA133 still are be best cost/effective solutions.

    But I would love to use an external 10K SATA disk drive.
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