Brian Beardall wrote: > I would get the sata II controller. The advantage of the sata II > controller is the addition of NCQ. NCQ is what helps make SCSI drives so > appealing and fast. NCQ is not available on most sata I contollers. If > you have PCI Express on your motherboard you should be able to get a > sata II contoller for about $30. If you only have PCI then you can get > one for about $63. Sata II is also backwards compatible with Sata I and > so it is a win win situation buying a sata II contoller.
You may be correct, but here's my experience. Until a month ago I used a SATA I drive and controller; now I'm using a SATA II drive and controller. Differences: - According to "hdparm -t", the SATA I drive was limited to 55 MB/s. The SATA II drive is limited to 76 MB/s. Both 7200 RPM. (The 10K RPM drives I've experimented with could transfer 90 MB/s.) - Although I have NCQ now, I haven't noticed any differences. I would expect NCQ to more fairly balance I/O requests between processes, but I haven't seen any sign of that. However, I don't know of a quantitative measure of this. - I suspect the choice of filesystem may be more important than the choice of controller. I used to store all my MythTV programs using XFS. I switched to ext3 on LVM so that I could shrink the partition at a later time. However, it turns out XFS was nicer to the disk while recording (less seeking), and it was a lot faster at deleting multi-GB files. So an option to consider is to buy the less expensive card now and save for a new sub-$100 motherboard with PCI Express, SATA II, gigabit NIC, 8 built in USB ports, etc., etc. Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
