SATA Hard Drive Question

[Marco]

My current computer has two 160 GB SATA150 drives (RAID 0). I plan to upgrade and add more drives. Does this mean that I can only use SATA150 drives? I assume that the motherboard only supports this? I saw one at the local store that is a SATA 3.0GB? How much of a difference is this in terms of performance?

Thanks!

 

[mallaig]

The drives and controllers are cross-compatible. Since each drive has its own channel you can mix speeds and each drive will operate at the highest speed supported by the controller and the individual drive.

The real world difference between SATA and SATA II drives is about 10MB/s (on a SATA II controller) in my experience.

Cheers.

 

[TimK]

You probably won't notice the difference in speed with SATA or SATA II during everyday use.

 

[Panos Kazanelis]

“SATA II” actually doesn’t mean much—not even SATA 2.0. The reason people associate it with the latest hard drive technology is because SATA II was temporarily the name of the SATA-IO (Serial ATA International Organization), the working group responsible for developing the SATA spec. Of course, SATA II will probably stick around for a while as a blanket term for hard drives with 3Gbps signaling rates and, usually, NCQ (native command queuing).

Even “3Gbps SATA” isn’t the proper name for the current technology. The latest specification is officially Serial ATA Revision 2.5, although few manufacturers advertise drives as SATA 2.5. A 3Gbps interface is the feature most power users want right now, so that’s how I chose the drives for this roundup.


Have a look here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

 

[zzhangz]

I suggest you trying Raid 5. Raid 0 is not safety.

 

[bruceh4]

I suggest you trying Raid 5. Raid 0 is not safety.

As stated before RAID 0 provides no fault tolerance. A failure of either drive means the loss of all data in the array. A better option with only 2 drives is RAID 1 where data is mirrored between both drives. A failure of one drive does not destroy the data. To run RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives. A failure of one drive does not destroy any data. As for drive sizes, if you have say 2 150 gb drives and want to add another drive, you are wasting money if you add say a 200 gb drive. The 200 gb drive will be treated like a 150 gb drive by the RAID controller.

 

[Paul Alexy]

I would not suggest mixing different drive types in the same RAID array. I believe most motherboard manufacturers recommend that you even keep to the same model drive to avoid introducing performance variations.

If you are contemplating a second RAID array on the same board and your board will handle it, I suggest you check your motherboard re compatability with the different SATA iterations. If it doesn't handle the 3Gbps rate, your choices would be to upgrade your motherboard, add in a card that does handle the drives, or you may be able to run a SATA 2 drive on it, by changing a jumber setting on the drive to make it backwards compatable with slower drives by using the slower transfer rate.

 

[Beezle]

Or: back up your data and you can live just fine without any sort of raids.