need help determining sata300 performance benefits

[Matt2662]

i have just purchased a seagate barracuda SATA300Gb/s 7200RPM 500GB hard drive for my gaming PC, hoping to increase the overall performance of my PC for playing mainstream games.

i have read that SATA300 doesn't really offer any real-world benefits over SATA150- is this true? if so, are there any real performance differences?

i have also read that using NCQ can help to improve a SATA300 HD's performance- is this accurate? if so, is there a noticeable performance difference if NCQ is enabled?

i believe my motherboard (Asus A8N-SLI Premium) supports NCQ so i should be able to use it.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

 

[cdogg]

In terms of bandwidth, you've pretty much heard right. SATA300 doesn't actually help a single drive run faster than it would on SATA150. Most drives are still averaging less than 70MB/s transfer rates with peaks well below the 150MB/s ceiling of SATA150. However, RAID changes that. When you are running multiple drives, the SATA150 interface begins to saturate. There are some noticeable differences in using SATA300 in those situations.

However, there's that feature called NCQ. It significantly improves a hard drive's performance making it one of the leading advantages for SATA over IDE. I don't recall exactly, but I believe you need the second-generation SATA300 to use NCQ. You may want to google that to be sure. If that's the case, then the bandwidth point I made earlier is moot. You definitely want NCQ.


~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
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[Matt2662]

thanks for the response,

so between the options of (1) using Raid 0 with 2 SATA300 hard drives, and (2) enabling NCQ to be used with a single SATA300 drive- which is the better option in terms of real-world performance?

 

[wahnula]

RAID 0 will almost always whup a single drive's butt...even an SSD. I read a review where they ran two 150GB VelociRaptor in RAID 0 against a MLC SSD and the RAID array won most of the categories. BUT...and this is a large one...RAID zero offer 1/2 the fault tolerance of a single drive, so regular backups or images of the array are mandatory.

A popular combination these days is two smaller drives in RAID 0 for the OS& apps and a stupid-huge 1.5 or 2TB secondary drive for data, although you WILL still need a second stupid-huge drive for data backups. You can even backup critical parts of the OS to the data drive.

A good thing to remember is cdogg's advice above, which is that the HDD is usually NOT the bottleneck in a system. While a faster HDD or array will help with boot times and general overall speed, the gains are usually minimal and academic.

Well, except for two SLC SSD's in RAID 0...

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Matt2662]

thanks for the detailed response- but what about the option of using NCQ on a single SATA300 drive by comparison- any better for performance or any difference at all?

 

[cdogg]

Matt,
What are you comparing that option to? An SATA drive using NCQ will outperform most non-NCQ drives by a significant margin.

Now the question remains as to whether or not you need SATA 300 over SATA 150. After doing some searching, it appears that NCQ was available as a feature in SATA 150. However, a lot of the first motherboards with SATA 150 didn't include the full extensions of the new interface. Therefore some SATA150 motherboards do not support NCQ.

That was years ago during a brief period of time. Most newer motherboards with integrated SATA support do support NCQ, and just about every board from the last 2 years.

Can you tell us what product(s) you are looking at buying and the model of your motherboard so we can make a solid recommendation? I can talk theory all day!


~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[paparazi]

Completely unrelated but important never the less: your new Seagate drive is very likely to be one of the effected ST3500320AS models with SD15 firmare and will need upgrading (flashing) to SD1A before it turns itself into a paper weight.
Gaming performance is not going to be vastly improved by fitting a new hard drive (the accompanying clean install of Windows is likely going to have more effect than the drive itself)
The sigle most important factor for gaming performance is the graphics card, followed by the processor and then the amount of ram. The hard drive comes in at number 4 with only a small influencing factor over gaming performance.
The new drive with clean install, will make the PC feel more zippy but....compare a 3D benchmark, before and after and I doubt you will see much of a difference (maybe a few hundred points higher if that) even if you go for the two drive raid 0 configuration.
NOTE* I'm answering your specic query where you say that you are: 'hoping to increase the overall performance of my PC for playing mainstream games'

Martin

On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep

 

[Matt2662]

thanks for the FYI on the hard drive, paparazi... i will have to check that out.

cdogg, i am aware of the performance margin (if any in some cases) between using a SATA drive with and without NCQ- what i am looking for is a performance comparison between enabling NCQ on a single SATA300 HD (assuming it has to be enabled), and using two SATA300 drives in a RAID0 configuration, if in fact there is a notable comparison to be made in terms of performance margin.

FYI, i'm not discussing theory here- the hardware specs you are looking for are in my first post..

thanks for the responses.

 

[cdogg]

OK...

1) NCQ and RAID 0 can apparently be used at the same time. So there is no reason to compare and contrast the two. I say "apparently" because that's what I gathered from the following article:

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Maxtor-DiamondMax-10-Exploring-NCQ--RAID/

2) No, you should not have to enable NCQ. If the host controller on the motherboard supports it along with the hard drive, it should enable itself automatically.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.