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ATA133 Controllers Have Arrived
Spot writes "If you're a hardware junkie, then you may already know ATA133 is on it's way to becoming the new standard for drive controllers. LittleWhiteDog has a very detailed look into the Promise Ultra133 TX2 Controller and Maxtor's D740X-6L ATA133 interface drive. " And I just bought a few 100g drives :) I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G. I love this.
How is the linux support for ata133 interfaces??
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
due to the limitations of 32bit PCI, this effectively makes my ultra160 SCSI controller and hard drives obsolete as far as transfer speeds are concerned (and i assume the ata133 will be considerably cheaper than u160 devices of the same size based on past experience with IDE vs. SCSI). well, 15,000rpm is still nice though :)
anyone have good reason now (other than slightly superior seek times) to stay with SCSI solutions?
I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G. I love this.
:)
:))
You should see what kind of drives they are just *giving* away these days...
2 gigs? I'll never fill that up!
(seriously, you'd be suprised how many people consider their old 2 gig drives to be in the same league as their old 30 meggers a few years ago!
It's been a long time.
are commands sent over the IDE bus synchronous? i remember reading a few years ago that one of the major differences between SCSI and IDE was that SCSI controllers could take commands out of sequence. anyone know anything about this?
So what's the deal, is ATA133 a viable alternative to SCSI in low end (1-2 CPU) servers? Does it play nice even at high loads? Will I get decent performance even when all drives are accessed all the time (RAID 0+1 on a busy NFS server)? Does it support hotswapping?
And when is SerialATA due? Those stiff cables aren't any fun at all.
READY.
#
My friends "in the know" say that all this ide-spinoff stuff still suffers from the major drawback that it uses a lot more cpu than scsi, and hence the bandwidth numbers they proclaim are not achievable on a standard system...does this new ata stuff attempt to address this, or have I been trolled in the first place?
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Seems that IDE/EIDE drives are the choice for cheap and large. I'm certainly guilty of buying a few. However, I am wondering why fibre channel and SCSI aren't more popular for the desktop?
/. a few months ago about an interface gadget that let's you chain them with CAT-5 ethernet cable. That would rock!
For application installs and OS install/cache, a 10,000 rpm LVD Ultra160 is hardly fast enough for me. Also, I have 9 drives on this system. I can only do 4 with IDE, and if I put in a second controller, I blow another IRQ (of which there are only 10 available of 16 - sad commentary on PC architecture). Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this.
Allow me to extoll the virtues of SCSI/LVD:
-15 drives/devices per IRQ
-Lightning fast.. 320 mbyte/sec now
-Doesn't slow down your CPU when moving or copying files from one drive to another
-The above applies to burning CDs as well (a major bonus)
Basically, with all this going for it, why isn't SCSI more popular (and less expensive)?
And what about fiber channel? Seems there was a story on
Why is everyone buying IDE? Or are they? Just curious.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
I'm not going to argue with any of your points, but I still disagree. SCSI is still faster than IDE and most people tend to agree that SCSI components are better engineered. SCSI is a stable standard that is probbaly going to be around for a while. Linux wise, you don't have to bother messing with emulation and the possible IRQ nightmare. I don't see why there won't be a mixture of standards. IDE/ATAPI for joe consumer, SCSI for us discrimating desktop/server buyers, and FC for people who have too much money and like buzzwords.
Has anyone actually benchmarked FC and the latest SCSI drives? I'm curious as to the differences.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Supposed to ship today, THAT'S the baby, raid-5 with 48bits LBA support. That means 960GB (6x160Gig using maxtor 160GB drives) of storage for dirt cheap, plus Raid-5 support.
:)
I am planning a non-critical datacenter (rendered frames and so on) with that setup, it's crazy, while a single drive is not offering the performance of the barracuda 180GB 7200rpm drive from seagate, it's like C$500 for a 160GB drive whereas the seagate would cost me around C$2500, you can get to the same performance (plus increased storage and safety with Raid 1 or 5) for the same price than a single seagate drive. it ROCKS.
I can't beleive I payed C$300 for a 40MB on my amiga1200 not even 10 years ago
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Because it's cheap.
Like someone said up above, it's because the SCSI vendors decided to stay in the Servers that the price never came down.
Quick scan on Pricescan.com
Cheapest large SCSI drive there
Seagate Cheetah 73.4GB 10K Ultra160 SCA
$635.00
Cheapest medium SCSI drive there
BM Ultrastar 36LP 36GB 7200 Ultra160 LVD
$210.00
For ATA-133
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 80.0GB Ultra ATA/133
$195.00
I know that SCSI is better. But is it worth getting the SCSI card and paying alot more? Not to me it's not. I play some games, mess around on the Internet and thats it...SCSI won't make that any faster.
One other thing that definitely falls in the "please suck less" category is write caching... Lots of otherwise decent ATA drives lie about data having been written to the platters, when it is really still just in the drive's on-board cache. This inflates benchmark numbers, but it also makes it impossible for the operating system to guarantee filesystem integrity. (journaling filesystems don't work when the drive lies about what data has really made it to the disk...)
As far as I know most SCSI drives don't deceive the OS in this way.
That's why they're making SerialATA. Faster, hot swapable, and no more channelsx2 drive limit.
Put two very fast hard drives on the same channel and you can push 100 or even 133 MB/sec pretty easily. Sure, it's going to be power-user and (once the RAID version of the card hits the streets) low-end server territory, but that's exactly Promise's market.
But, as you noted, that's a rant about IBM AT architecture. There's no such problem with IDE on a Mac, so it's not IDE's fault.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hey dude just a FYI.... Per the Linux manpage hdparm(8) -X66 is for UDMA Mode2 (ATA33) Transfer Support. -X34 is for UDMA Mode2 MultiWord Transfers. Also you should only have to use hdparm if you are still running a pre 2.4.x kernel anyway are 2.4.x and beyond support and are able to enable by default both ATA6 and ATA100.
All employees must wash hands before using the bathroom. - The Mgmt.