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on-board ata vs pci ata
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Oct 2001
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I've got a dual 500 G4 with 5 drive connected using a Sonnet ATA/133 PCI card and the on-board ATA controller (which I think is only ATA/66, but not sure). Anyways...I'm trying to find out information about the optimal way to connect the drives. The PCI card obviously provides faster connection than the on-board controller but the combined throughput of all four drives on the PCI bus in addition to the presence of a PCI video card creates a bottleneck. So I'm wondering, mainly, where I should put the system disk? Any information would be appreciated.
-Greg
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 2000
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And you can boot from a drive connected to the PCI card?
What do you use your Mac for?
Is there any reason why you can't put you system on your fastest drive connected to your fastest bus?
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Oct 2001
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Yes.. I can boot from any drive location (PCI and on-board of course).
I use my mac for almost everything, except gaming. I would, and have in the past put my system drive on a slot on the Sonnet PCI because the drive is ATA/133 and so is the card. But recently I've been thinking about the total speed of the PCI bus and how much I'm trying to force through it. The alternative, putting it on the on-board controller, while slower at first glance, may actually prove to be faster because it is the sole device on that bus and has exclusive access to it, compared to having to share the bandwidth of the PCI with 3 other drives and a video card.
Of course not all drives are "always" using their full bandwidth, but at least two (possibly three) of the other drives are frequently busy with consistent transfers.
Anyways...this is why I'm looking for anyone who has seen benchmarks or has information about this.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Los Angeles, CA
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Well, the ideal setup is each drive on its own ATA channel. But since you've maxed out your ATA channels, it's more of a "which drive to share the channel with" approach. If you have certain drives (frequently) transferring data with each other, it's best to separate them into their own channels.
As for the PCI bottleneck, well, like you said, none of the drives can saturate the bandwidth that often, perhaps only when they're in their peak performance. If you're really concerned with performance, you might opt to go RAID, or maybe even SCSI, or just get another PCI ATA controller to have each drive on their own ATA channel.
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Last edited by ginoledesma; Oct 29, 2003 at 09:51 PM.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Dec 1999
Location: Utah
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Also remember that most disks are hard pressed to saturate even an ATA/66 bus. So ATA/100 and beyond (Serial ATA is another example) is kinda a waste. Rarely do you actually burst out and saturate an ATA/133 bus, and only then for a few miliseconds. Add all these miliseconds that an ATA/133 would save you over an ATA/66, and you get.... A few miliseconds. Granted this will change over time as HD speeds pick up. I run a ATA/133 RAID with 2 drives on one PCI card, 2 other drives (Non-RAID) on another PCI cards, also with a PCI video card. and 1 Drive on the ATA/66 Bus built into the machine. Runs great with no noticable slowdown from PCI saturation. This is a on a G4 DP800, 1.5GB RAM. Running Panther.
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