On Sat, 30 Dec 2006 22:24:34 -0700, "Shane Hathaway" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > 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.
NCQ is mostly going to make a difference in - highly random-access oriented loads - where you're beating the living hell out of the disk If either of these isn't what you're looking at then I would expect no measurable difference. Also NCQ isn't supported out-of-the-box in vanilla kernels before 2.6.19 IIANM. -Jonathan /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
