SATA Drive

[acidrainy]

Im Looking for a pair of SATA drives as my next upgrade.....
I's going to run them in RAID 0 to get some preformance outa them.... Although im looking to sata for preformance im also wanting the drives to be quiet....
Basically I'm looking for a good noise/preformace ratio

I've heard Seagate are the quietest.... and the PDF ive looked at say that 3.3 bells is the highest volume it gets to? (would this be decibells or some other measurement?) This sounds stupidly quiet considering the human hart is at 4-7db...iirc?

Anyways, I was just basically wanting suggestions and/or recomendations

[THCi]

Well, do you want the 2nd Gen SATA drives, aka the TRUE sata drives, not the ones with the SATA converter built in.

If you were thinking of the second route, why not simply get two quiet drives, get two converters (or one if youve still got the serillel converter that came with your mobo?) and hook the drives up.

Ive considered going down the second route myself, getting two drives, one converter and letting rip. Should have a nice performance kick.

But remember that the SATA RAID controller is on the PCI bus, limiting the transfer rate to 133Mb, which the SATA150 (which is what our boards use) overruns by 17Mb, so not MAX performance can be gotten.

But, it would still beat two PATA RAID drives on the PCI bus.

And, I doubt that the Seagate drives are 3.3 decibells, sounds way too unrealistic!

[Stoo]

Na, he's getting confused, the drive manufacturers quote in Bels to make it sound quieter, so it's actually 33 deciBels..

Also remember that dB is an exponential scale so each point up is twice as loud as the previous (Or something..)

[acidrainy]

I was talking about buying 2 SATA drives... You sure that i can only get 133 outa the onboard chip? Its Advertised as 150... wouls that not be missleading advertiment?

[Stoo]

If that was true then SCSI wouldn't be at u160 or u320.. (yes I know about 64bit cards before anyone gets smart )

[acidrainy]

Originally posted by Stoo
Na, he's getting confused, the drive manufacturers quote in Bels to make it sound quieter, so it's actually 33 deciBels..

Also remember that dB is an exponential scale so each point up is twice as loud as the previous (Or something..)

BTW Its every 3dB that the volume is effectively doubled

[tfboy]

Although I've had a horror experience with Maxtor D740X drives (DiamondMax 8 now superceded by the 9's), I have to say they're pretty quiet and fast. In my raid 0 configuration, when reading from them directly to memory, i.e. doing a sfv test or testing extraction of a set of rar compressed files, if those files are written sequentially, data is read around the 60-70MBytes / sec I guess. Remember, all drives are pretty quiet when reading data sequentially. They get noisy when the heads have to move around to get to the data. So it pays to defragment them regularly to minimise head movement and therefore noise.

Of course, if I extract those files to my other drive on the P-ATA interface, the speed cripples, but just the HD -> RAM across the PCI bus is pretty fast...

From reading a couple of reviews, it sounds as if the WD Raptors are not that much better than other native drives, and the 10,000rpm probably makes noise a little too high.

I haven't done any testing on my rig with native sata drives, so I guess it can only be faster

Oh, and if you want to be really specific, it's dB and not DB

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by tfboy
From reading a couple of reviews, it sounds as if the WD Raptors are not that much better than other native drives, and the 10,000rpm probably makes noise a little too high.

Well, I've a pair of Raptors setup in a RAID0 array and I've also gotten a pair of D740X (liquid bearings) setup in a RAID0 in another rig, and to be completely honest, one is not any louder than the other.

Go with the Raptor!!

[Stoo]

Spikegifted: Raptors are okay if you don't want much storage

Acidrainy: Ta, knew it was something like that, but couldn't be bothered to look up the exact specs

[acidrainy]

I'm prolly looking for 2*120 drives...

[Ivor Life]

thats exactly wot ive got

2x st3120026as 120Gb in RAID

they actually are supposed to be 2.5 bells and if u have any fans in ur rig u wont be able to hear them at all!

as reviewed here

i think the are pure sATA drives but cant remember..

IMO the are very quiet, reliable drives

btw while ur discussing them, are you gonna partition once u have setup? assuming you will still get two 120Gb in Raid! Ive only just set mine up and 240Gb is a large amount!!

[acidrainy]

Originally posted by Ivor Life
thats exactly wot ive got

2x st3120026as 120Gb in RAID

they actually are supposed to be 2.5 bells and if u have any fans in ur rig u wont be able to hear them at all!

as reviewed here

i think the are pure sATA drives but cant remember..

IMO the are very quiet, reliable drives

btw while ur discussing them, are you gonna partition once u have setup? assuming you will still get two 120Gb in Raid! Ive only just set mine up and 240Gb is a large amount!!

yeah 2.5 is the lowest they go....... if you read the pdf info thing it says it will go up to 3.3 in preformance seek, whatever that is

btw whats the preformance like with these 2 running ?


and yeah, i'll prolly partition.... not sure about a 40/60 or 50/50 ne though

[tfboy]

Hehe, I think I'm the partition king...
Here we go
C: 50Mb FAT16 Used as a boot partition only for the 4 OSes
D: 5Gb NTFS Used for Windows 2000 Pro
E: 7Gb NTFS Used for Windows XP Pro
F: 4Gb FAT32 Used for Windows 98 SE
** 4Gb + 2Gb partitions used for Linux
G: 15Gb FAT32 Used for storing games
H: 15Gb FAT32 Used for all my mp3s
I: 10Gb FAT32 Used to house all my setup files, drivers, etc
J: 10Gb FAT32 Used to store all my work and "precious" files
R: 150Gb NTFS composed of my two 80Gb Maxtor DM8+9 on serillel adaptors in Raid 0 configuration

That may seem like overkill, but there is a good use for it:
the J: drive which houses all my work files also houses my win2k / XP user profile so all my work, pics, favourites, email, etc is stored here.

That means that all the OS partitions can point to this J: drive independently and that way, I just need to have an image of my OS drive. If the OS goes tits up, I just reimage the OS partition and all my work stuff is untouched

The J: drive is relatively small and so can easily be backed up on dvd-r. I do this monthly, and of course, it's independent from the OS configuration...

I'll admit it's a bit OTT though. Next time I build / upgrade my pc, I'll prolly consolidate my mp3s, games and work partition into one, and still keep the OSes seperate.

The only real downside of course is that the free space is split across the partitions and so in that sense, it's less economical. However, the big 150Gb NTFS partition has 4k cluster size, so that stays efficient even if there are loads of small files. I can't remember what the default cluster size in FAT32 would be for a 150Gb drive, but it would seem silly to have an autoexec.bat file take up 64k when there's nothing in it!

[Sibu]

my GOD thats a rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish load of partitions. But it prob works well for ya. U still use win98? wats that for?

[acidrainy]

Hmmm, I'm a 1 OS man myself.... If I want to play with linux I use knoppix

I mainly only use 2 partitions 1 for OS and Installed software, the other for files/patches/divx/mp3's/backup etc etc...

Genrally means that its unlikly that a virus etc will effect that partition so safe to format/restore the 1st one

[Agent]

Originally posted by acidrainy
I was talking about buying 2 SATA drives... You sure that i can only get 133 outa the onboard chip? Its Advertised as 150... wouls that not be missleading advertiment?

yup.
The current SATA protocol will allow upto 150mb/sec, but as the SATA chip is a seperate entity on the PCI bus and not on the south bridge, the max it can ever transfer is 133mb/sec - not that you'll find a HD to do that, so dont worry about it