Hi All

 

I have a complete 12 disk IDE system running the original hardware configuration.  The mobo is an Intel D865GLCLK and it has 1.5 SATA.  With the 1TB SATA drives coming down in price, I'm going to be purchasing 2 of these. 1 for Parity and 1 for cache usage.

 

Since this is an IDE system do you think I would see a huge increase in performance if I only use the onboard SATA ports?  Should I consider getting a 3.0 SATA card?

 

 

These are just my untested opinions, I don't have a similar system.  You should be able to see an improvement in writes just from moving the parity drive to a different bus AND to SATA.  SATA150 is certainly faster than ATA 100 (150MB/s vs 100MB/s), which is probably what you are using now.  And of course, a SATA Cache drive will make writes faster too.  I don't think you will see any real improvement in performance in adding a PCI SATA300 card, because you are then trying to feed the SATA300 (300MB/s) through a shared PCI pipe (133MB/s).  SATA150 (150MB/s) is already faster than the PCI bus (133MB/s), so doubling the SATA speed is not likely to show measurable improvement.  In my opinion, you would need a PCI Express bus (250MB/s on each lane) to take advantage of the extra speed.

 

do you think I would see a huge increase in performance if I only use the onboard SATA ports?  Should I consider getting a 3.0 SATA card?

I think you will see an increase in performance with parity because of the SATA interface, drive mechanics and cache on the drive.

When I updated the parity drive on my multiple 500GB 7200 RPM system with a 1TB 5400 drive I saw a noticeable increase.

These are all at 3gb/s, but drive mechanics and caching were different.

 

So upgrading from a 500GB 7200 RPM drive to a 1TB/5400/16MB cache drive showed a difference. (for me).

 

With your IDE system, it should be noticable, but not drastic as the IDE drive will still hold everything back.

It will just be that the parity and/or cache will make it less of something to hold writes back.

 

I would say unless you are going to to put more SATA drives in the system, wait on the 3gb/SATA card.

The other drives will hold it back and as it is, they will probably be sharing the same bus anyway.

If you get a 3gb/SATA card really cheap, then by all means consider it. You just may not see that much of an improvement to make it worth while.

 

i dont think youll notice much. ata 133 is 133MB/s. sata 1.5 is only slightly faster. and even the faster hard drives barely satiate that speed. as for the pci, my pci slot is peak 533MB/s. but as i said, that doesnt matter since the drives are much slower.