Buying A Computer: Drives (Part 2): Affordability And Performance Buying Tips
Hard Drive and Multimedia Drives: Today, we will investigate the new SATA drives. This hard drive does not come in the Compaq Presario SR1617CL-B; however, this is one of the technologies that you should be aware of when doing comparison shopping. SATA stands for Serial ATA. SATA is being touted as the next generation replacement for IDE drives (a.k.a ATA, PATA Ultra DMA). The SATA hard drives are designed to deliver 150 Mbytes/sec transfer speed. This gives you a big boost from the 133 Mbytes/sec you get from the best ATA-7 drive commonly referred to as Ultra DMA-133. Surprisingly, the every day performance of the SATA drive has been about the same as the ATA predecessor.
One of the significant technological features is NCQ. NCQ stands for native command queuing. NCQ employs an algorithm called Rotational Position Ordering (RPO) to speed access to the data. I know all this acronym soup sounds �geekie�; therefore, I am going to simplify this tech talk for you.
Imagine being in a hardware store. You have a list of items that you need to purchase. In front of you are several aisles. The items on your list could be on any one of them. The first item on your list could be on aisle 3 and the second on aisle 17 and the third on aisle 1. You get the picture? This is very inefficient. If you go in sequential order down your list, you could end up going back and forth between the first few aisles and the last few aisles many times.
Well, NCQ using RPO fixes this inefficiency problem. NCQ using RPO, if it were a shopper like you, would reorder the list of items according to the aisle. In other words, all items on aisle 1 would be at the top, all items on aisle 2 would follow, etc. You can quickly see that all of the back and forth traveling would be stopped allowing you to get the list of items in a more timely fashion.
There are more details about SATA that could be discussed such as the 33% improvement reported by Seagate attributed to the NCQ technology versus SATA drives without the NCQ technology; however, when buying a computer, here is what you should know: in the real world of home office - small office desktops, SATA only shows significant performance gains when the system uses RAID technology which is seldom used in these environments.
In summary, although the hard drive manufacturers are excited about SATA, the average home office computer with a single hard drive does not benefit enough to justify the increased cost of the SATA drive. It is December 13, 2005 as I write this article so in the future as the price gap closes it may well be worth it. If you are planning on having a server with several users and a SATA RAID configured server, in that case, the benefits will abound. In my next article, I will pull the covers back on the multimedia drive community.
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By : Olan Butler
Keyword : Compaq Presario, Serial ATA, SATA, NCQ, RPO
