is anyone actually using SATA drives?

[Testin da Cable]

I was having a look at the 73GB WD Raptors (10k 8mb etc), and they seem very nice imo. Not mind having two of them striped on my a7n8x delux' SATA interface

 

[Ch3tan]

I'm using SATA, but only a 7200 rpm drive. WAs looking at the WD raptor, but only the 36gb version was out when I bought mine.

The noise and heat generated put me off putting it in a shuttle, but I don't see why it wouldn't be fine in a full size case.

 

[xane]

Is it true SATA is hot-swappable ? And how does Windows cope with it if it is ?

 

[Testin da Cable]

yes, they can be hot swapped. article here

 

[Xavier]

pair of them here.

 

[mookie]

ive got 2x80Gb Maxtor SATA DMax+9 7200rpm @ RAID0 here on a gigabyte GA7VT600-1394. fast is not the word. sandra results here

 

[Xavier]

it's worth noting that current SATA drives offer a ZERO performance increase over conventional Parallel ATA technology - they're both choked by a PCI bus which stops either even hitting 100mbps, let alone the 150mbps first gen SATA claims to offer. ATA-100 is your technilogical limit, the only reason to buy SATA now is futureproofing for later SATA-only motherboards and the far less obtrusive wiring...

(incidentally, the pic is my rig, dual Barracuda V 7200RPM, 8Mb Cache 120Gb on the ASUS P4C800 which offers native SATA support thanks to the ICH5R southbridge of i875 (Canterwood), tres spinkeh - oh and I'm not posing by having the drives like that, because of the waterchill they don't fit in the usual bays )

Xav

 

[(Shovel)]

Originally posted by Xavier
(incidentally, the pic is my rig, dual Barracuda V 7200RPM, 8Mb Cache 120Gb on the ASUS P4C800 which offers native SATA support thanks to the ICH5R southbridge of i875 (Canterwood), tres spinkeh - oh and I'm not posing by having the drives like that, because of the waterchill they don't fit in the usual bays

Is that to say that the i875/Canterwood does offer the performance boosts due to being native? Or does it also fall under the "bottlenecked" point?

 

[Krazeh]

I got 2 120gb sata maxtor drives in a raid 0 array, very fast, love em

 

[Xavier]

it's still technically treated as a device on the PCI bus - so hits the exact same limitations I'm afraid.