Greetings and salutations, I have a rather strange situation I am gonna need some help with, but I currently have no one to turn to since I am kinda the computer guru around where I live >_>;; A friend pointed me here recently and i decided to see if y’all could help me.
Here is the situation:
I am finally getting parts to build my self a new computer(my current one is a relic!) however there are some things I am really concerned about, I have 4 EIDE harddrives (all MAXTOR ATA133 with 8MB buffers) the sizes are 80GB, 120GB, 120GB, and 200GB. I have always had them all use a single full size FAT32 partition and no problems.
Here is the tricky part. To increase performance I have already got some EIDE to SATA (vice versa) converters, so I can hook all my Harddrives up as SATA hardrives. However, I am kinda woried whether or not DOS, Windows 98 and NT will be able to install to a SATA harddrive(I use 5 operating systems: DOS, Windows NT, Windows 98SE, Windows XP pro, and Windows server 2003)
Assuming I cannot directly install 98 nor NT to the hardrives when they are using the converters and set up as SATA drives, would I be able to install them on the harddrives when they are setup normally as EIDE drives, and then put the converter back on having them seen/booted as SATA drives?
Note: The SATA controller is intergrated into the mother board…
I don’t think you would actually get any kind of performance boost with an adapter. Because even if at the end you have a SATA connector, the throughput would still only be normal ATA speeds.
The thing you’re going to run into is driver support. I know that Windows 2000 is getting to be the low man on the totem pole as far as Windows support goes. I don’t think that any SATA controller has a DOS, Win9x or WinNT support, but I could be wrong.
Secondly, Addis is right: you do actually take a little performance hit using PATA ->SATA converters. The other bad news is that early on, these converters were notorious for their habit of screwing up data. I don’t know if newer ones do this, but you might want to know that info.
Theoretically, if you were savvy enough, I suppose you could make your own driver for it, but that could run into legal issues with possible reverse-engineering.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t work for sure, but from what I understand, you’re probably out of luck on this one.
Well, I used them on a friends computer and surprizingly enough it really does give a significant performance boost.
My guess would be that you get 100 or 133 bandwidth on each IDE channel. But if you use 2 devices on the same channel you would cut the bandwidth in half. This means that even if you have 2X 133 devices on the same channel. Their performance would be limited to 66 or 50. That would explain why my performance(like boot and loading times) went down drastically when added a second harddrive on the same channel as my boot drive.
But this is just my own theory, also I am not doing it strictly for performance. I have more than 4 IDE devices and my IDE controller cards are 16bit-ISA. Since the selfish sonabitches who make motherboards no longer include use Uart chips for ISA slots, I get shafted! (yes I want a VESA-EISA slots right next to my PCI express slots!)
Regardless, thanks for the Info big B. I am getting the converters for free from my dads work so thats why i am using them.
Should I maybe run a test to see if the data gets corrupted when I swap interfaces like that?
EDIT: I just got all the parts and I am currently backing everything up. I will give y’all the final specs and such when i am done, wish me luck!
The ATA100/133 is how many MB/s for a burst rate, while you’re realistically looking at a sustained transfer rate of 40-60MB/s. I’m not sure if this applies to SATA, but I don’t see it jumping vast amounts because of the newer interface. The ceiling is raised, but it’s raised above something that’s not being pushed all the time. You can replace tires built for 100mph speeds on your Yugo with ones for 200mph. The Yugo probably isn’t doing 100mph at all, and if it is, it’s very rare. Just because you expand something doesn’t mean you’ll be able to make use of it.
I could see the SATA controller being quicker than the IDE if the SATA controller’s design is more efficient and/or the driver is somehow better in terms of performance.
There’s also the mental aspect of it.
Well, it may just be that I am on a new installation(and hardware) but dear god I can’t believe the performance increase in everything!
It was a royal pain in the ass to install 98 but I got it. For some reason it lags for 8 minutes before i finally get into windows… I got a backup computer quad booted aswell but I am gonna try to tinker with 98 to try and fix it.
Windows NT does NOT like my setup one bit… it froze during the setup numerous times. :eek:
thanks for the info D, I had a similiar Idea about how IDE speeds worked, but that pretty much cleared it up…