On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:19:26 +0200 Volker Armin Hemmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Samstag, 28. Juni 2008, Florian Philipp wrote: > > Hi list! > > > > I've got a little question. Here I've got a PC with two 40GB hard > > disks, a CD-burner and a DVD-burner, all PATA. Now I'm running out > > of disk space and I'm thinking about ways to increase it: > > > > 1. I could replace the older 40GB disk with a new model but I'd > > hate to trash it because it's working alright. > > > > 2. I could replace the really old and rather useless CD-burner with > > a disk. However, that would mean I'd have to attach the DVD-burner > > and one of the disks to the same controller. Now I'm asking myself > > (and you ;) ) how that would affect performance. > > wikipedia can answer that. "'One operation at a time' This is caused by the omission of both overlapped and queued feature sets from most parallel ATA products. Only one device on a cable can perform a read or write operation at one time, therefore a fast device on the same cable as a slow device under heavy use will find it has to wait for the slow device to complete its task first. However, most modern devices will report write operations as complete once the data is stored in its onboard cache memory, before the data is written to the (slow) magnetic storage. This allows commands to be sent to the other device on the cable, reducing the impact of the "one operation at a time" limit. The impact of this on a system's performance depends on the application. For example, when copying data from an optical drive to a hard drive (such as during software installation), this effect probably doesn't matter: Such jobs are necessarily limited by the speed of the optical drive no matter where it is. But if the hard drive in question is also expected to provide good throughput for other tasks at the same time, it probably should not be on the same cable as the optical drive." So I can hope that caching will negate any negative effects as long as one of the drives is much faster than the other (e.g. optical and hard disk drive) even when I'm streaming a (theoretically) constant byte stream from one to the other (ripping, burning)? > > But why not a cheap sata controler and a nice big sata disk? They are > cheaper now than PATA disks. cheap SATA-controller: EUR 35 cheap 160GB SATA-disk: EUR 35 cheap 160GB PATA-disk: EUR 40 cheap 250GB PATA-disk: EUR 45 Not cheap enough it seems ;) It would be more price efficient to trash one of the current disks for the new one than buying a new controller. By the way: Actually the mobo has two SATA-controllers but one of them crashes on POST while the other one doubles the time the POST takes. That's why they are both deactivated.
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