S-ATA What is the situation like now ?

GBauwens · Post by **GBauwens** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 5:39 am

The title tells it all. Can someone tell me if S-ATA is okay for hardrives in order to manage throughput at low latencies for audio ?
More and more laptops come equipped with 1 or 2 S-ata drives so I would like to know before I buy.

Thank you all.

Geoff

arela · Post by **arela** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 6:56 am

S-ATA is ok.
my daw has 2 s-ata discs, that's all.
Been running since may 2003.

GBauwens · Post by **GBauwens** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 10:59 am

OK. Thanks. Anybody else with good results ?

Post by **garyb** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 11:07 am

sata is fine.

katano · Post by **katano** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 3:20 pm

i work with 2 s-ata disks for a year now. no problems at all...

cheers
roman

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 5:17 am

I bought a Maxtor 250 gig sata last weekend and have been unable to use it. Windows won't format it or partition it even though it's recognised correctly in the bios. De drive itself is ok (worked perfectly in another machine)
After some searching I found out that this disk has lots if incompatibility problems with certain sata controllers, like the ones on Nforcce 3 or Nforce 4 mobo's. Other brands apparently work fine usually so i'll be returning this one.

djmicron · Post by **djmicron** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 11:51 am

i have 1 seagate sata drive,
i've used it on nforce 3 boards without problems.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: djmicron on 2006-04-27 12:51 ]</font>

GBauwens · Post by **GBauwens** » Fri Apr 28, 2006 12:46 am

Thanks to all already. I am more confident now.
Anyone with specific laptop recomandations with S-ata drives ?

By the way does it interrupt the CPU in a similar way as IDE or does it always acces through PCI therefore compromising your scope acces to the cpu ?

valis · Post by **valis** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 1:56 am

All intel chipsets (and Nforce?) should provide 2 parallel IDE and 2 SATA 'ports' that have their OWN connection to the main system bus, separate from the PCI bus. All modern motherboards have DMA to reduce cpu load, and SATA has a feature you can sometimes fine called NCQ (native command queueing) which makes things a bit better still, but you must have it on both your chipset and the harddrive for it to work.

Only RAID controller chips that provide the 3rd & 4th ports on a system that already have 2 ports (of that type) should have any issues where they take up PCI bandwidth.

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 2:30 am

I exchanged my problematic Maxtor for a Seagate....no more problems

This is a very nice drive (Seagate 7200.9, SATA2, 250 GB) and very quiet as well.

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 12:55 pm

2x Seagates SATA here, 160GB and 200GB, and they are very nice. Can't remember if they are 7900.7 or .8, I got them around a year ago. Never going back to IDE, ever!

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 3:39 pm

I have the 36GB Raptor for O.S. + Apps., I quickly outgrew the 74GB with Giga DVD's so that now has my GigaPulse Impulses on it, recently bought a PATA 2 SATA converter for a 3rd Raptor w/16MB cache,10k RPM, 150GB. These are constantly in use with no failures. 4 to 6 hours during the day, and 4 to 6 hours at night. The mobo is the Intel 865PERL w/ P4 3.4EE Northwood, that has only 2 SATA ports, that's why I bought the SATA converter. I'm sure that this sounds outrageous, but the polyphony increased dramatically with the new HDD RaptorX, don't know if it is the access time or cache or both, but with the 3.4, and this new drive GS3 Orchestra can load and play my whole library through the port channels by program changes, or MIDI channel changes. Scope and GS3 Orch have never crashed, except on human error, which I seem to do off stage at least.

GBauwens · Post by **GBauwens** » Mon May 01, 2006 3:00 am

Thanxs again to all, especially valis for his technical insight.
I am now looking at a laptop which comes with 2 5400rpm sata drive as standard features. But it also has IDE ports so in case it doesn't work I can alwas switch one or both to IDE (I still have an 7200RPM 2.5 ''IDE drive). Is 5400 sata slower than 7200 IDE ? I would guess so...
To scope4live: my second drive would be for GS3 or rather its GVI / VST version when it comes out. Not that I need huge polyphony but how much can I expect ? Also at what latency is it playable ? Does it depend much on the drive speed and acces time ?

Geoffroy Bauwens.