"Dr. Anthony J. Lomenzo" wrote in message
...
Golden stuff, Pete! Where were you last weekend when I attempted all
this SATA/RAID business? ;-)

Sorry...I must've failed to notice the Bat Signal. I'll try to keep a
better eye out next time.

[...] but what
about these add-on gizmos like that High Point Tech company "RocketHead
[sic] 100" that plugs into the 40 pin IDE drive but then the other side
of the gizmo makes it possible to connect [with a SATA data cable]
--and-- using Legacy power -- standard Molex 4 prong cable] via another
adapter on the thing into the SATA slot. Is this, more or less, simply a
means to get the IDE drive onto the SATA slots and 'benefit' from that
SATA data cable?

That's the kind of adapter to which I referred, that I used to install
regular IDE drives on my SATA controller.

As for why one would do that...

I looked at some benchmarks, and it appeared that the SATA controller
potentially had a lower CPU utilization than the IDE controller, for
high-bandwidth disk access. In my case, I'm dealing with video editing
which involves moving huge amounts of data around, often at the same time
the CPU is trying to process that data. For games, you are unlikely to be
using the disk for significant periods of time during high-CPU-use
activities, so it probably wouldn't matter in that respect.

As far as the drive access speed itself goes, as it appears you've already
surmised there's no benefit to using the faster controller if the disk can't
keep up. At this point, no consumer-level drives can even exceed the older
ATA 133 speeds, never mind the bandwidth of a SATA controller, so putting a
drive on the SATA controller won't help in that respect. In the future,
perhaps consumer level drives will be fast enough to warrant using an
adapter, but by then I'd guess SATA would be standard issue connectors on
all drives anyway.

Your guess regarding the cable type is probably the most common reason to
put an IDE drive on a SATA controller using one of those adapters. Not only
is the "clutter factor" reduced, but airflow through the case is MUCH
better, which is very important for those overclocked, maxed-out gaming
machines many people like to play their games on.

In addition to the CPU-utilization advantage (which, by the way, I've found
no conclusive evidence to support, as it turns out...I went back to the
benchmarks later and discovered that they had been updated, and the
advantage was not so pronounced), another advantage to using an adapter is
that IDE drives are still easier to find, and it's a way to put six drives
into a box that would otherwise only fit four (four on the IDE controller,
plus another two on the SATA controller...or even more if the controller has
the extra connections).

Finally, perhaps the most interesting advantage for many applications
(though not flight simulators) is the question of what happens when you have
two disk drives plus an optical drive (CD or DVD). As it turns out, for a
given IDE controller, the data rate on the cable is limited to the slowest
device on the cable. So putting a hard disk on the same cable as an optical
drive can really slow the hard disk down, as the IDE controller reverts to
the older ATA66 or even ATA33 standard for the optical drive. On the other
hand, if you are trying to copy large amounts of data from one disk to
another (as is often the case when dealing with video editing), having both
hard disks on the same cable creates a lot of contention between the two
drives, as they both try to share the same wires running to the computer.

So, a solution to that is to give the optical drive(s) their own IDE
controller, and give each hard disk their own IDE or SATA controller. Since
pretty much every motherboard comes with only two IDE controllers, then if
you also have SATA, you can dedicate a data channel to each storage device
by putting one or more on the SATA controller. With the standard two IDE
controllers, plus a two-channel SATA controller, you can have three disks
each on their own controller (two SATA and one IDE), along with up to two
optical drives (both on the same IDE controller, one as master and one as
slave), without having any of the storage devices interfering with the
others (well, you still get bottlenecks closer to the CPU, and the two
optical drives still have to share, but those are less significant issues).

I guess in the end, even where there's a potential speed improvement, most
users aren't doing the kinds of things where they'd notice the difference.
But there are still a few valid reasons for adapting an old IDE drive to a
new SATA controller, if you think you might notice the difference, or you
just want to rationalize (most of my computer hardware was rationalized,
rather than justified ). Just don't pay too much for one of those
adapters!

Pete