On Saturday 06 December 2003 05:29 pm, Janus Sandsgaard wrote:
> > So, then the main difference is that the P4BGL-MX/533 has
> > ATA/133 IDE ports, and the P4P800-VM has SATA, but only
> > ATA/100 IDE ports. I'd suggest avoiding SATA for now, so I
> > think the P4BGL-MX/533 would be more suitable for use with
> > Linux with ATA/133 drive(s).
>
> What is SATA?
Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (for IDE harddrives).
It's theroretical thruput is 150mb/s compared to ATA/133's
133mb/s. In reality this synthetic marginal gain doesn't often
happen, specially with Linux. People with SATA happily report 45
to 50mb/s from 'hdparm -t'. Big deal. My ATA/133 drives get 47+.
Real world average performance is less than half that. Many
problems and high cpu load are reported with SATA/Linux.
Currently there's only good full kernel support for VIA and
Intel controllers. Besides, SATA will soon be deprecated by PCI
Express. Best definitive source for research into this is the
lkml (linux-kernel mailing list) archives. Ignore (windo$e)
hardware site reviews. Actually 'burst' numbers like hdparm -t
are pretty much useless too. Just a synthetic bench that has
very little relevance to various real world IDE operations.
IMO, better to stick with ATA/133 for now.
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
