News - Seagate ships world's first SATA 6Gb/s hard drive, the 2TB Barracuda XT

[shaithis]

SSDs are already head bumping, put them in raid and they already way oversaturate SATAII....

Each drive gets it's own SATA channel in any (decent) raid, if 1 drive cannot saturate SATA-II, then it isn't going to in RAID either, unless the combined data throughput of all the drives in the RAID maxes out the bus the controller is on.....and with most raid controllers at the moment being PCI-E 8x, I cannnot see that happening any time soon either!

[cordas]

Each drive gets it's own SATA channel in any (decent) raid, if 1 drive cannot saturate SATA-II, then it isn't going to in RAID either, unless the combined data throughput of all the drives in the RAID maxes out the bus the controller is on.....and with most raid controllers at the moment being PCI-E 8x, I cannnot see that happening any time soon either!

So your point is what? That PC manufacturers shouldn't be putting in place new tech standards to cater for future needs? When should they start devising new standards, given that these things tend to take ages to be agreed and then even longer to be implemented and longer still to filter down to production hardware...

As far as I am concerned I am annoyed that they didn't go further and specify 9gig transfer rates, or 99gig transfer rates. If the tech industry had stayed with SATAI (which is still fast enough for most HDDs) then there would be no point in any manufacturers looking to develop SSDs as they would be near pointless due bandwidth restrictions.

As for my suggestions about single package raid SSDs they are pointless at the moment, there is no point in creating a single SSD package with internal raid capabilities because a single SATAII channel would choke. With SATA6G I suspect that companies will split their drives capacity and implement an internal raid configuration allowing them to double/quadruple/quintuple data rates, as we are currently seeing on a few experimental PCIe SSD drives. Its a relatively quick and easy way for manufacturers to boost performance exponentially up to the bandwidth limits of SATA 6G. Afterall 'drive' failure rates are irrelevant, if a sector goes bad its gone bad and the data is lost regardless, the SSD controller will just adjust accordingly.

[miniyazz]

As for my suggestions about single package raid SSDs they are pointless at the moment, there is no point in creating a single SSD package with internal raid capabilities because a single SATAII channel would choke. With SATA6G I suspect that companies will split their drives capacity and implement an internal raid configuration allowing them to double/quadruple/quintuple data rates, as we are currently seeing on a few experimental PCIe SSD drives. Its a relatively quick and easy way for manufacturers to boost performance exponentially up to the bandwidth limits of SATA 6G. Afterall 'drive' failure rates are irrelevant, if a sector goes bad its gone bad and the data is lost regardless, the SSD controller will just adjust accordingly.

FYI, the reason SSDs have such high transfer rates is because they are effectively RAIDed internally aready..
And performance would not be increased exponentially. And when SSDs develop bad sectors, the data is not lost, you just can't write to them any more.

And I suspect that companies may have a greater understanding of how to make the most out of their SSDs than someone who thought RAIDing two drives together would max out the SATA specification, no offense

[cordas]

Need a reminder on what the RAIDDrive actually is? Put simply, it's a RAID configuration of multiple Super Talent SSDs, housed in a 258mm x 112mm x 25mm unit designed to interface with a system's PCIe x8 slot. The end result is capacities of up to 2TB, and seriously-blazing read and write speeds of up to 1.4GB/s and 1.2GB/s, respectively.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=20247

Still salivating over the ridiculously-fast Super Talent RAIDDrive we mentioned earlier today? Well, if you don't want to wait until October for Super Talent's drives to ship, OCZ reckons you don't have to and has today announced the availability of its own PCI-e based storage solution, the Z-Drive.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=20253

Maybe you can read these articles and tell me how I have miss-read them?

[shaithis]

So your point is what?

Nothing, I was just correcting your understanding of drive bandwidth, especially in RAID technology......

I personally have no need for SATA-III and don't see a need for it for another 2 years......giving vendors plenty of time to implement it.

[miniyazz]

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=20247



http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=20253

Maybe you can read these articles and tell me how I have miss-read them?

You fail to answer any of my points. Those drives you refer to are essentially several SSDs raided together, the only difference being they go through a PCI-e interface and are built into the controller rather than going through SATA to a regular PCI-e controller (because yes those speeds would saturate ICH10R for example). But SATA II is capable of handling that, it is the inmbuilt SATA controller on the mobo that is not.
And great, the speed of the 'drive' is increased the more drives you add, but not exponentially.

And if you're seriously suggesting that the fairly ridiculous prices of those drives are anywhere near appropriate for regular Joe who wants an SSD in his system, you need your head looking at..

And btw, yes I'm in favour of SATA 6 gbps.. but I'd far rather they brought out USB 3 instead; it's much more needed.