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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Tech Guide: Serious speed with Serial ATA By Mitt Jones, Special to ZDNet May 17, 2004 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hardware/desktops/soa/Tech-Guide-Serious-speed-with-Serial-ATA/0,139023402,139147795,00.htm
Upgrading your hard drive is a great way to wring more performance from your PC, particularly if you frequently load large applications or files.Hard drive performance may be especially important with demanding applications such as video editing. In this Tune-up, we step through the ultimate hard drive upgrade, adding two blazingly fast Serial ATA (SATA) drives in a performance-enhancing RAID 0 array. (For a quick refresher on the pros and cons of the different types of RAID, see the page Reasons to RAID.) SATA supports throughput as fast as 150MB per second, even in first-generation products, topping Ultra ATA/133's maximum speed of 133MB per second. Second-generation SATA products will double maximum throughput to 300MB per second. Plus, SATA uses a compact cable that's significantly smaller than an ATA ribbon, allowing for less clutter and better airflow. Unless your PC is fresh off the assembly line, adding one or more SATA drives will likely require installing an ATA PCI controller from a company such as Promise Technology or Adaptec. We chose the US$75 Adaptec SATA RAID 1210SA controller, which can connect two drives in a RAID 0 or 1 configuration. We completed our array with two 10,000rpm 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives, priced at US$239.99 apiece. We installed the SATA array as the boot drive in a Windows XP system alongside an existing ATA hard drive.
Before you buy components, spend a few minutes planning your upgrade. If you'll be leaving your current ATA drive in the system, make sure your PC has open 3.5-inch drive bays for two more hard drives. You'll also need an open PCI slot for the controller. To ensure optimal performance from your RAID configuration, buy identical drives.
Make sure you have the room before you get started. This project requires two 3.5-inch bays and a PCI slot. Next, decide how to configure your RAID array. We chose a Level 0 array, which boosts drive performance by interleaving data across multiple drives, a technique called data striping. Inexpensive RAID controllers should also support RAID 1, which protects against catastrophic drive failure by automatically mirroring the contents of your primary drive to a second drive.Back up your current hard drive before you start upgrading, if only to prepare against accidental overwriting.
As with any PCI card, installing the SATA controller requires removing the bracket for an available PCI slot, seating the controller firmly in the slot, and securing the bracket to the frame. Some controllers include a connector for the system's disk-activity light. If you want the light to indicate the SATA drive activity, disconnect the LED's cable from the motherboard's two- or four-pin disk-activity connector and attach the cable to the controller's connector.
To install the controller, remove the bracket cover, seat the card firmly in the slot, and secure the bracket. To guard against damage due to static discharge, wear an antistatic wrist strap or make sure to touch a bare metal surface of your PC's chassis before touching the hard drive controller. Handle the controller only by its edges and the rear bracket.
Now it's time to install the SATA drives. If you can choose among multiple open drive bays, consider cable connections and routing before making your selection. With our test system, for example, it made sense to move the existing ATA drive to a different location to avoid cable-routing problems.
It's often easier to connect the SATA cables to the drive first rather than trying to connect them after you've placed the drive in the bay. Depending on your PC's chassis design, it may be difficult to connect cables to the rear of the drives once you've secured them in their bays. If so, connect the SATA cables to the rear of the drives first. If you're using front-accessible bays, pass the free ends of the cables through the front of the bay and into the system and install each drive in its bay far enough to allow connection of the power lead. Then secure the drives in their bays. If your chassis design requires screws, make sure to use the ones that the drive manufacturer supplied.As with the drive controller, use your wrist strap or touch a metal surface of your chassis before handling the hard drives and handle the drives only by their edges.
Attach one of your system's white power leads to the four-pin connector on the back of each drive. You'll also need to connect one of the white power leads in your system to the four-pin connector on the back of each drive. If your system doesn't have two free power leads, buy one or more inexpensive Y-connectors at any electronics or computer outlet.Check your cable connections one last time before closing up your system in preparation for the next step.
To ensure that your RAID controller is properly installed, go to Device Manager and click the plus sign next to SCSI and RAID controllers. You should see an entry for your controller.
You'll need to partition and format your array before you can use it. You can do this manually within Windows XP using the Disk Management utility (search the Help and Support Center within the Start menu for more information), but the configuration utility that came with your hard drives should provide a much easier solution. The best of these utilities make it easy to migrate all of your data and applications from an existing drive to your new drive.
Use the Data Lifeguard Tools utility, which comes bundled with the Western Digital Raptor drives, to set up the new array as the boot drive and to copy over all of the data and files from the existing boot drive. We used the Data Lifeguard Tools provided with our 74GB Western Digital Raptor drives. The utility automatically detected that a hard drive needed to be set up. If you want your array to function as your boot drive, choose "Add the drive as the new boot drive" to have Data Lifeguard copy all of the data and the files from the existing boot drive to the drive array. Then click Next until the process begins. After all files have been copied, the utility will instruct you to click Next to restart your computer.If you don't receive utilities with your drive, try the manufacturer's Web site. Most drive manufacturers post their drive utilities online.
After your system reboots, you should be able to view your drive array in My Computer as a new hard drive, but drive letter C: will still be assigned to your ATA drive. The BIOS setup routine in many newer systems lets you set the boot order of your hard drives to boot from the drive array instead. Reboot your system and use the appropriate keystroke or key combination to enter your PC's BIOS setup routine (F2, for our test system). Then look for an option that lets you change the boot order; in our test system's BIOS, it was Hard Disk Drives within the Boot menu. If your system provides no way to change the hard drive boot order, you may need to remove your existing ATA drive to coax the system into booting from your fast new SATA array. Another option is to leave your ATA drive as the boot drive but move all or select data and applications to the new drive array.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configurations can be tempting for those of us who enjoy technology, but they do have their drawbacks. Before you invest hundreds of dollars on a RAID controller and multiple drives, weigh the pros and cons. For many PC users, the attraction of RAID comes down to performance: With the striping method used by RAID Level 0, most files are spread across two or more drives. This increases performance in the same way splitting up chores hastens progress. With two or more drives working concurrently on data that's normally handled by one drive, effective drive performance increases dramatically. This won't likely make everyday business applications or even most games run much faster, but you should notice your system booting more quickly and your software loading much faster. The biggest payoff is with storage-intensive applications such as video editing. The chief drawback of RAID 0 is a higher risk of data loss. RAID 0 makes no allowances for data redundancy, so if one drive fails, you lose the data on both. When using two drives, you effectively double your risk of drive failure. RAID 1 achieves nearly the antithesis of RAID 0: Every file written to one drive is automatically written to a second. This ensures that no data is lost should either of the two drives fail. Performance, however, changes little or is no better than with one drive. Some RAID controllers or software let you combine the performance of RAID 0 and the safety of RAID 1 using both techniques at once, often referred to as RAID 0+1, RAID 01, or RAID 10. With this approach, however, you'll need at least four drives. High-end cards offer support for RAID 5 arrays, which offer both data redundancy and increased performance by combining striping with data parity. These arrays require a minimum of three hard drives.
Serial ATA (SATA) seems destined to replace old-standard Parallel ATA as the hard drive interface of choice for future PCs, making it a technology worthy of additional reading. Many hardware manufacturers' Web sites include at least an introduction to SATA, but Maxtor provides more resources than most. You'll also find useful introductions to SATA on hardware sites such as Tom's Hardware Guide and TweakTown. The Serial ATA Working Group's site is worth a look as well. If you want to learn more about RAID, a great place to start is the excellent discussion of RAID solutions on AnandTech. The comprehensive overview of RAID at The PC Guide also provides a wealth of useful information. To learn more about a given RAID controller before you buy, including how to install it, check out the support section of the manufacturer's Web site. Installation guides and manuals are often available for download.
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