Am in the UK. On 21st June I posted here that I wanted to get a bargain
250 GB Samsung hard drive.

I asked if I should get SATA or PATA for my oldish system Via SV266A
mobo with Duron 1800 cpu and 768MB SD-RAM.

I have many medium sized PATA drives and do not need another one to
leave on this system when I migrate to a mobo with native SATA support.

However there was some doubt if my SV266A chipset would mean that a PCI
SATA adapter would slow the transfer rate noticeably.

So how about using an external drive (I guess would be SATA but that is
possibly academic) which goes in through USB 2.0. That way it could be
transferred from old to new systems.

The USB enclosure costs exactly the same as the PCI adapter card for my
existing mobo to take SATA.

Apart from uncertainty about booting (I am on XP) from the USB drive,
are there any other problems I should bear in mind?

"Warra" <warapoje@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:Xns97FCF05491F29628D1@127.0.0.1...
Two items I can think of first is buy an enclosure with it own power supply
some manufacturers make a point of recommending this as USB struggles to
power a drive in continous use.
The other is a number of driveenclosure are not recognised correctly by XP
( we have had 2 different ) as they are cheap I would pay a little more and
buy one from a local dealer rather than mail order you are more likely to
get advice on a suitable enclosure that way rather than relying on returning
one that doesnt work with your system.
Derek

Warra wrote:
A couple of things come to mind.

1. Make sure the USB enclosure actually supports the size and type of hard
drive you plan to stick in it. Some support 3.5 SATA, some 3.5 PATA, and
some the small laptop sized drives.

2. You need check out your motherboard's BIOS settings and see if there is
an option to "Boot from USB" or something similar if you plan to try booting
from the USB drive. Most newer motherboards have it as an option but many
older BIOS versions do not.

In article <Xns97FCF05491F29628D1@127.0.0.1>, Warra <warapoje@yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:

The problem with this plan, is external enclosures are quite
variable in quality. I've seen a number of comments on Newegg,
about how the enclosure and drive run hot, because the enclosure
had no fans.

I think somewhere along the way, there must have been a flaw in
the logic.

On my Firewire enclosure, I think I got 30MB/sec. Daisy chaining
two Firewire enclosures, the second enclosure managed 20MB/sec.
The Firewire bridge board inside the Firewire enclosure, actually
limited the Firewire to Firewire traffic, more than the disk to
Firewire path.

On my USB2 enclosure, I got about 35MB/sec. And the bridge board
in that case, was an Oxford. There are plenty of other USB2
enclosures that will give under 33MB/sec and probably less.
57MB/sec is the theoretical maximum, and I've never heard of
an enclosure even getting close to that.

You believe the PCI bus in your computer is limited to 60MB/sec.
The beginning section of a 7200RPM disk drive, manages about
60MB/sec in sustained transfer rate. It doesn't matter
if the interface is PATA or SATA, the rate the data is put on
disk, is limited by the head assembly and data density on the
disk.

Now, if you purchase a PCI SATA controller, mount your SATA
hard drive inside the computer, even if the PCI bus only
allows 60MB/sec, the hard drive is not going to go faster
than that anyway. And notice how 60MB/sec, is faster than
either USB2 or Firewire 400 results listed above.

I think you should stay away from the external enclosures,
since the majority of enclosures are crappy designs both
mechanically and physically. I think I got a good
enclosure the last time I bought one, and I ended up
drilling holes in the case, to get enough air circulation
to keep the hard drive cool.

If you mount your new SATA drive inside the computer, the
power and cooling come for free. The only additional
expense, is the PCI SATA card for about $25 or less.
You can use cheap internal SATA cabling to connect
the controller card to the disk. Just remember to
buy a controller card, with the right connector for the
job. An internal disk needs a connector mounted internal
to the computer. An external disk needs a connector
mounted on the PCI faceplate.

The last good looking SATA external enclosure I saw, was
an expensive quad. The single drive enclosures are generally
awful, and could well kill your new drive, before it gets to
see your next computer.

Paul

Warra wrote:

If you've got the drives, use them. Putting them in an external
enclosure and connecting through USB is easy.

"Paul" <nospam@needed.com> wrote in message news:nospam-1007062205570001@192.168.1.178
No, it is not. That is just the bit frequency of the bus divided by 8, -5%.
Where did you get that 5% from.
No way that the serial bus protocol PLUS the ATA protocoll only costs 5%.
IDE (ATA) already had 10% overhead by it's own.
Think more of 30% for USB which would bring the maximum to 42MB/s.

Nope, but it still needs more than 60MB/s to allow for command overhead.

USB HD enclosures can turn out to be pretty slow.

Nero says that mine only manages 17 Mb/s. The HD in it is good for twice
that.


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On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 23:37:31 +0100, Warra
<warapoje@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

You don't have to, migrating to a mobo with native SATA
doesn't mean it won't have PATA. Practically all the
current boards with SATA do have at least one PATA channel.

It is a good match having many medium sized PATA, plus
another drive, all on that old system? I'd wonder if it's
time to remove one of the smaller drives as they may not be
so reliable anymore or soon not so.




It depends on what you're doing. If it's only to backup
files, you might not notice. For some other uses you
wouldn't either, but anything very demanding of disk I/O you
may notice.


Many (most) are PATA, not SATA. Obviously with SATA being
newer, more and more external SATA are showing up in the
market.

That will be even slower than an SATA PCI card. Buy an
external enclosure only if you "need" it to be an external
enclosure.

I have no idea what two products you are comparing but
generally a decent SATA card can be had for less money than
a decent external enclosure.


Don't- Do not plan on booting from the USB drive to run a
big OS like XP, it will be significantly slower.

Run your operating system from a hard drive connected
directly to the motherboard PATA controller. A modern PATA
drive will be significantly faster than any other
budget-conscious alternative. By that I mean, you could get
an SATA card and a relatively expensive WD Raptor, or a SCSI
PCI card and high RPM SCSI drive(s) and the raw drive
performance would offset the performance penalty from it
being a PCI card on the PCI bus of your Via chipset
motherboard, but it's an expensive way to end up with
sub-optimal performance, it would be better to replace the
system before (instead of) that.



Your best option is to buy a PATA hard drive.

If/when you buy a new system it should have at least one
PATA channel. If you waited SO LONG that it didn't have
PATA anymore, THEN you would buy a PCI card.

Any other option is either slower or far more expensive, or
both.

kony <spam@spam.com> wrote
And plenty have just one, which can be a real
problem if you have to use that for the boot drive.

Add just one DVD burner and all your PATA channels are gone.

He clearly wants to use it on the new system.

Mindlessly silly.

Depending on how backup is done, that may
actually be the most demanding use of the drive.

Which most backup is.

Irrelevant as long as those that are SATA are the same value.

Or when external enclosures are better value than
SATA PCI cards and you dont care about thruput.

He isnt prepared to use ebay to get the best prices on PCI SATA cards.

He clearly said he wants to use a bargain hard drive.

He clearly said he wants to use a bargain hard drive.

So it was pointless considering this alternative.

Nope, you limit your choices of a new system too much.

And if its only got one, its full straight away.

Makes a lot more sense to have bought SATA instead.

You havent established that with a PCI SATA card.

On 12 Jul 2006, Rod Speed<rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote:


As OP, I have to say this is a persuasive argument.

It seems I would currently have difficulty attaching three PATA
drives to a mobo. In the future there seems to be even less chance of
being able to do this.

Warra <warapoje@yahoo.co.uk> wrote
Yeah, real downside for someone like you that accumulates drives.

See end for posting.















Kony, what about turning all this the other way around and asking you
if I would be able to run my PATA drives satisfactorily on a future
mobo by using a PCI adaptor on that new mobo to take PATA drives?

PROBLEMS: (i) You were uneasy recently that my Via SV266A chipset
would provide decent throughput for a SATA drive attached by a PCI
card. (ii) You say above that a USB connection may also be slow.
(iii) I would add that the cpu power & SD-RAM speed of my current
machine is not great.

But a future mobo would have much better bandwidth, faster memory
than my SD-RAM and a faster processor. Would all these mean that I
would get reasonable throughput and response time if I put my current
PATAs on to a PCI adapter card on the new future mobo?

I guess that PATA drives (I have several 160 GBs ones) attached like
this are not going to be as good as SATA drives attached to SATA
connectors on a future new mobo. But would this PATA performance be
hopelessly second class compared to the SATA drives?

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:14:21 +1000, "Rod Speed"
<rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote:

yep, or go the stupid route and argue that it's better to
not use features so you have them available in case you ever
need to use them, but of course you can't THEN use them
because you wouldn't later have them available to, err, use.


Yes and you completely missed the point, that if adding a
new 160GB drive does he need the OLD DRIVES ON THE OLD
SYSTEM anymore.


Did he claim to have a NAS or other mass storage backup
method? Hopefully, but if not, you'd be a fool to think old
drives won't fail. Their lifespan is about 1/3rd of a
decent fan which you feel is a reasonable risk.


Do you sit and watch your backup being made? Most people
would get on with other things I suspect. Therefore, no
realtime need for higher performance, the level of demand
involved is irrelevant so long as it doesn't take multiple
times as long.


Actually most either backs up very few files, is to a
removable media slower than the HDD, or uses compression...
any of which make the HDD I/O of less consequence.


As relevant as relevant gets, it was a direct response to
the posed guess.



They are _NEVER_ a better value IF you don't need an
external enclosure. Maybe one exception would be a
temporary pricing error on a website or some large rebate
being involved in the price, but we can as easily assume
same scenario would apply to SATA PCI cards as well. Even
then, external enclosure is still inferior for the purpose
of drive cooling (best of either implementation), shock
preventions, power supply.


Not a matter of prepared, most people aren't stupid enough
to risk ebay on dozen-dollar items. ebay is great for rare,
or substantially discounted parts where the risk is offset
by the savings. That just isn't the case with a mere PCI
SATA card.



Yes, but if I didn't clarify then trolls like Rod would feel
they had even more to nitpick.



See above.


No, obviously it still has a gain, and it would have been
better to replace the system already even if NOT considering
this new HDD. Recall the mobo has the problematic via
southbridge and no USB2 or firewire unless he'd added a card
for that.


What a fool you must be to think that when new systems DO
have PATA. The only limit is your grasp of basic facts.
Even if the new system did NOT have PATA he'd still be
better off opting for a PCI card later rather than now
because the new system certainly won't have the old via
southbridge on it.



Nope, at most it has one drive on it. SATA optical drives
are coming soon too, major manufacturers have announced
them. That'll be two PATA positions you'd waste for no good
reason.


Makes no sense at all to not buy what the system already
supports because the next system which also supports it,
won't have free channels AFTER supporting it, channels that
would never be used otherwise because of an aversion to
using them.

yes I have, your lack of knowledge simply interfered with
understanding it. Given same (grade, performance tier of)
budget drive it is a certainty. Unlike the fairy tales you
paint, we have the benefit of retrospect, and benchmarks
still available online for that southbridge's PCI w/drive
controllers.

On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 20:42:34 +0100, Warra
<warapoje@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Not necessarily "currently", it depends on what board you
choose. Some have one channel, others two still.

The future is something we can't predict because we have no
idea if you'll buy a system at all, at least not while this
current drive still works. We also dont' know that the
optical drive you'd use would be PATA or SATA, that there
would be any lack of PATA channels.

This is a very good reason NOT to buy now what you are only
speculating about in the future when it is detrimental in
the present AND more expensive too.

If/when the time comes that you need more PATA, that's the
time to buy a PATA card. It is going to be best to avoid
putting any more PCI cards on your present motherboard, and
to avoid USB1, and even USB2 if practical.

All of this info has already been covered in another thread.
It is completely redundant at this point so I'm done with
the thread.

"kony" <spam@spam.com> wrote
Good call!


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Warra:

What pci cards do you have? If none, there's nothing for a pci serial ata
card to interfere with (such as a SoundBlaster). It will still be fast
enough for non-demanding use. However I agree with kony.


--
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"Ed Light" <nobody@nobody.there> wrote in message news:0bftg.1989$RD.1676@fed1read08
Whatever that is.

"Ed Light" <nobody@nobody.there> wrote in message news:d%etg.1987$RD.686@fed1read08
Yeah, like it will still have PCI when it won't have IDE anymore.

You a Kony sockpuppet?

kony <spam@spam.com> wrote
And you limit your choice of motherboard if you need more than one.

Wrong. Its obvious that the number of PATA channels will drop.

Very unlikely he wont given how long modern hard drives last.

So unlikely that that possibility isnt worth considering.

Yes, but it still gives you more future to
assume that the DVD burner will be PATA.

He's already decided that he needs the new drive now and
is just deciding which interface format makes most sense.

Makes more sense to go with a SATA drive now,
particularly as many new motherboards have
bugger all slots now that so much is integrated.

You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.

kony <spam@spam.com> wrote
Never ever could bullshit its way out of a wet paper bag.

Irrelevant to the interface of the new drive.

He said he plans to use that new drive for backup.

Having fun thrashing that straw man are you child ?

Utterly mindless pig ignorant drivel, as always from you.

Lying now.

What I do is completely irrelevant. What matters is what the OP does.

And some choose to do incremental backups before
doing anything important like an install or reconfig, and
they are more likely to do that if it happens quicker.

Pity about the other situation.

Not a clue, as always.

Pathetic, really.

Wrong again, most obviously when they are significantly cheaper than
a PCI SATA card and a system which doesnt handle PCI cards well.

Mindlessly silly. Even someone as stupid as you should have
noticed the radically different volumes of external enclosures
and PCI SATA cards sold and the effect that has on prices.

Particularly when he choose to not use ebay.

Nope, because bugger all choose to bother with them.

Stupid assumption given that he already has a
number of drives in that system and that may
see the new drive not being cooled all that well.

Easy to ensure that isnt a problem.

You dont know that either.

The main downside with an external enclosure would
in fact be that you cant see the drive's SMART data.

Pity that neither external cases or PCI SATA cards cost that much.

Which is the case with both external cases and PCI SATA cards.

There isnt any extra risk with the operations that
are clearly retail operations that choose to use ebay.

Wrong, as always.

Never ever could bullshit its way out of a wet paper bag.

See above.

Yep.

Not when he's only interested in a bargain drive and is considering
which format gives him more future with his new system.

You dont even know that he can afford that.

Pity those cards cost peanuts, even if ebay isnt used.

Pity so many of them only have a single PATA port which
will be all used up with the new drive and DVD burner alone
and he cant choose to use any of the older PATA drives in that.

Never ever could bullshit its way out of a wet paper bag.

You dont even know that the new system will have PCI slots.

But may well not be able to use the older drives in his current system.

Yep.

Wrong. If he is stupid enough to get that new drive in PATA format,
and uses whatever he currently has DVD/CD drive wise, its full.

Irrelevant if he want to use what optical drive he is currently using in it.

He clearly is interested in least cost options, so he may well want to do that.

Pathetic, really.

Pathetic, really.

Lying, as always.

Wrong, as always.

Pity that you havent established that that particular drive
will even be limited by those. You dont even know which
of the benchmarks aplys to the PARTICULAR chipset he has.