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Hi,

I need some more space (and perhaps speed) for my vdat recordings. I was wondering if it makes sense to order a SATA 10000 rpm disk or just go for large IDE ?

It probably depends on the bitdepth and number of channels no ?

Cheers,
F.

I haven't tried this myself, but how about distributing the virtual tapes over several disks on separate channels ?
I would use the smallest and slowest disks available, i.e. 2x 80 gig instead one 160.

Had a talk yesterday with someone who had about 4 totally crashed drives in the last week - it's beautifully hot here currently
And I admit I recently was pretty shocked about the heat a 250 gig Maxtor at 7200 could develope...

Since VDAT preformats the tapes the most important aspect is the constant bandwidth written to disk and if those disks are on their own, 'undisturbed' channel, you'll probably gain a lot - even with regular drives, which of course could also be SATA.

It would be interesting to compare the same drive type on IDE versus SATA, haven't done that yet.

cheers, Tom

hmmm,

well I think I will start with 2x160g IDE in raid0 and see how that works out!

Isn't your CPU the limmit anyway?
I think I saw comments, that huge track counts means huge CPU load.

On 2004-08-06 06:24, Immanuel wrote:
Isn't your CPU the limmit anyway?
I think I saw comments, that huge track counts means huge CPU load.

especially with raid!

SATA (non-raid) with 7500 RPM 8Mb Cache should be sufficient I would think. I would also agree with astroman in that more bandwidth is easily achieved through adding more drives as long as they're on another port (915/925x;s ICH6 has 4, earlier intel SATA on ICH5 has 2 ports.

I don't recommend RAID. Onboard chipsets that aren't a part of SATA adversely affect PCI performance & latency, and SATA raid isn't a true RAID and adds a lot of CPU overhead. This isn't as true for the 915/925x Intel chipsets with ICH6R (southbridge). In fact there's even a new mode called NCQ which is similar to what scsi uses to multitask queued requests for volumes:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2094

Good summary above.

I have find that the SATA stuff seems to be performing a bit better for me.

I would definitely watch out for OS/MOTHERBOARD compatibility issues at this stage though. If you are on an old-ish Motherboard, the larger hard drives may end up giving you a huge headache, especially if they are your boot disk on the primary controller. So watch out.

Yeah, props to Intel here also. The ICH5R and in fact most of the more recent Intel IDE handling has been outstanding.