[This message has also been posted to linux.debian.user.] In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 12:05:42PM +0200, Dan H wrote: >> Should I go Serial-ATA or good ol' Parallel-ATA? How do the two >> compare in terms of data throughput and Linux kernel support? >> > > SATA-I gives 150 MB/s, SATA-II gives 300 MB/s, PATA 133 MB/s.
PATA/133 was a flaky kludge. It's amazing it worked at all. Even more amazing that people got away with cables over 18" long. SATA is a far superior interconnect. The instantaneous peak throughput of the original (four bytes wide, 33 MHz) PCI bus is 132 MB/sec. In real life you're not going to see over 90. So a SATA-II controller on a regular PCI card is bottlenecked at the motherboard slot. (So is 1000BASE-T Ethernet.) That's one reason "real hardware" RAID works better than "fakeraid." The smallest PCI Express (PCI-E) configuration should do 250 MB/sec in each direction simultaneously. A motherboard with PCI-E designed for workstations may bottleneck at the southbridge. You'll have to do some research to find a configuration that can run two SATA-II drives simultaneously at their full data rate. You'll also have to check around to see if the Linux driver knows how to run any particular controller in SATA-II mode. And there are still lots of workstation type motherboards that only do SATA-I. PCI-X is a kludge. I'd avoid it. Cameron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
