Nik Simms (Web Developer) wrote:
> Has anyone bought, used a sata 2 drive?
>
> Are they any better than the sata 1 drives. I read an article that suggest
> they are not that much different in speed.
A real SATA II drive should be much faster than a SATA I -- but only for
the length of time that it takes to empty the buffer. And 8-16mb of data
moves by very very quickly. After that the data flow is controlled
completely by the rate it can move to/from the spinning disk and even a
relatively slow PATA interface can keep up with that pretty well. So
what is left? Well, native command queuing is nice but for most people
and on a single-user system the effect will be pretty subtle (not to
mention that some SATA I drives have it and some SATA II drives
apparently don't!). I'm sure that some day data density will get to the
point where it can saturate a SATA I interface but that will probably be
a matter of years and then SATA II will really be necessary to maintain
the data flow.
Not specifically on-topic but this is an interesting article about the
obfuscation being practiced in the hard drive industry:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2450
--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com 
SATA 2 
Linear Mode
