On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 08:01:42PM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:11 PM
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: non-RAID SATA
I am looking for a cost-effective way to add a SATA drive to an
existing 7.0 system whose on-board controller is PATA, and am not
getting very far at all in identifying an inexpensive controller
which would be expected to work well. (I'd prefer PCI, since the
USB in this box is probably 1.0 and not capable of sustaining
desirable data rates.)
SATA is faster than PCI. Most people would replace the motherboard
or use a USB 2.0 card which has a far faster transfer speed than
PCI does as a transition, with the expectation that sooner or
later they are going to replace the system.
While it is true that the maximum theoretical transfer speed available
from SATA (150MB/s or 300MB/s depending on SATA version) exceeds that
of a normal PCI bus (133MB/s for a standard 32bit/33MHz bus), there
is currently no single SATA disk available on the market that will
swamp the PCI bus.
USB 2.0 is however much slower than either of SATA and PCI.
USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 480Mbit/s ( = 60MB/s)
with a practical maximum of maybe 30-40 MB/s - less than half of either PCI
or SATA.
All mentions of SATA in the hardware guide and FAQ seem to be of
RAID controllers, or else too generic to guide a choice of add-in
cards.
Does anyone have any experience with this that they would be
inclined to share?
In automotive terms your adding a free-flow exhaust to a restricted
engine - in the trade we call them adding a fart can because
they do nothing to help the car go faster since there's restrictions
further up the chain.
It is unlikely that a PCI-based SATA card would be a noticable bottleneck
in this case unless one were to connect several high-speed disks to the
card.
Go buy an inexpensive USB 2.0 external disk case, then buy your
SATA disk and stick it inside of that, with the idea that eventually
your going to get a faster machine you might be able to use the disk in.
USB however would be a quite noticable bottleneck. Bad idea if you want
anything resembling speed.
--
Insert your favourite quote here.
Erik Trulsson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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