Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

[SuperDaveVIII]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

There are more to hard drives then just their interface's transfer speed. Platter rotation speed, cache, seek time, latency, and volume size all come into play into detirmining a hard drive's performance.

No, going from a 100 gig 8 meg cache 7200 RPM PATA drive to a 100 gig 8 meg cache 7200 rpm SATA hard drive will not get you any speed results. The physical aspects of the drive limit how much data can be sent out. Your hard drive controllers also come into play. PATA and SATA controllers are not one and the same, and not all are made equally.

However, most newer SATA drives either come with some sort of "gimmick". 16 meg cache, 10k rpm platter speed, Native Command Queueing, or whatever. Which may, or may not, effect performance depending on what you're doing. Which is also another point, some drives do better in transfer, some do better in seek time - there is more then one performance aspect to a hard drive then how fast windows or your games load.

[Neat_Hedgehog]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

Yes. That's a very good way of explaining it. For instance, my OS loads lightning quick, and a few other things have been sped up as well. Has it dramatically increased my FPS in games? No. Has it sped up my game load times? Not really. I bought my drive for it's media incoding abilities that were demonstrated in the reviews it got. Which, given that I have an AIW card, was very important to me.

It also depends on your mobo, and what make of HDD you have.

[uk_ogre]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

... as I said: too many variables.

[AlphaNut]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

SATA is nice, but if you have a thick enough wallet then you can go for a Ultra2 SCSI in a RAID0 configuration. This should speed up BF2 loading times quite a bit
Btw. I have one GB of Kingston HyperX PC400 in my rig. Always one of the first on the map. I have tested it, however, with 2 GB of RAM, and loading times were even a few seconds shorter. Plus I could crank up all the settings including textures to their max.

[imported_Anzen]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

SATA is a lot faster then IDE , it will maybe never reach the speed of 150Mb/s , but will stick on about 50-60 Mb/s , while IDE disks only get speeds of like 20-30 Kb/s

Hahaha, yeah right. If you use IDE disks, you can't use anymore than 240kbps downstream because your HDD wouldn't be able to keep up....NOT

Ok, here goes: IDE, also referred as Parallel ATA approx = 100MB/s / 133MB/s
Serial ATA = 150MB/s
N.B. Serial ATA has a potential speed of 3.0GB/s, BUT every single SATA disk is rated 150MB/s, simply because the chipsets (under $5000) aren't able to transfer that much information. Raptors and Seagate Cheeta's aren't faster because they spin faster (respectively 10K RMP and 15K RMP), they only have faster seek times.

For faster loading times, you'd be best off with more RAM and a fast CPU (as the GDDR is fast, no matter what). Also, loading would go faster with a Intel rather than a comparable AMD, playing the game itself would probably go a bit faster with AMD than Intel (difference is like 2~3 FPS due to 3DNow! instruction set).

[cyborg_ninja-117]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

get high speed internet and ram, ull be on the map first

[imported_xRandoMx]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

If there's so little difference between UATA and SATA, I'd be interested to know why my OS now loads in close to 15 seconds, as opposed to 2-3 minutes with my old IDE. I didn't upgrade anything else, either.

Because the drives are newer/faster. Not because they're SATA, just because of drive tech.

If you'd bought new EIDE drives, it would load faster too, not to mention the fact that a clean install of win* always is a bit faster loading than one filled with the typical cruft that accumulates over time.

The max *theoretical* speeds increase with sata/sata2, but you never see those max speeds because the bottleneck is in the physical mechanics of the drive, not the connection method.

I can't remember the last time I saw somebody on my radar at the start of a map, with my current rig.

[BirdKiller]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

On the contrary, time it took for BF2 to verify my files was one minute and 30 seconds faster when it was installed on a IDE 100 drive compared to SATA 150 drive.

[pYura]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

SATA / PATA no difference in gamepoints, lol...

[OtinDako]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

I'm not really a tech geek but:

Heres my take:

Sata vs ide is almost the same in terms of cable bandwidth limit, but I don't know of too many 10k rpm ide's.

What he should of said was to get 10k rpm's drives (i.e. Raptor's) which I don't think is available in IDE.

Having said that, loading time (the process of moving data from your hard drive to your ram) can be sped up in two ways.

The most obvious way is to increase your drive speed (i.e. either upgrade to 10k rpm drives, or configure multiple drives in Raid 0 striped configuration or both).

The not so obvious way is to increase ram (ya, everyone says increase ram, it goes faster, without really knowing why).

Depending on what stuff you have loaded into ram (drivers, other programs), your ram could be fully loaded and at some point will have to swap page files with your virtual ram.

This page swapping is what is gonna slow down your loading.

So say for example, you have exactly one gig of ram, but 3/4's of the way to loading your map, all the pages in your ram have been filled, your computer will be using some time to dump some of those pages in ram, onto your virtual ram (page swapping) to free up some space for the rest of the map. This lag is probably longer than the difference between a 7200rpm drive, and a raid 0 striped configuration of two raptor 10k sata drives).

Look at the price difference (approximate).

1 extra gig of ddr ram to make the total 2 gigs (I have one gig already) = 120 bucks CDN.

2 sata 10k raptor drives = 2x 250 CDN = 500 bucks CDN.

I say, go for the extra ram.

Some factors I may have left out, some motherboards support 4 sticks of ram, but only at a reduced ram speed, this reduction is negligible, ram access speed >>> hd access speed (u need to account for seek time as well as limits of cable).

Another factor is that with a higher end card with more memory, you may require less ram since you might have enough room for all the textures, so going over 1 gig of ram may not make a difference).

[BurnTheWeed]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

Yes, but SATA makes you aim better!!!!!!




lol

[imported_bigpappa]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

Nonsense. The difference between SATA150 (SATA1) and IDE133 is negligible. Maybe the next generation SATA2 will be noticeably faster but SATA1 certainly is not. My game is installed on an IDE drive and I am first one the map more often than not. It is just another marketing gimmick. If you want performance increase you need to set up your drives in a RAID configuration or buy a 10K RPM or 15K RPM drive.

SATA drives are nice because they reduce the cable clutter in your case and not because they are faster, they are not.

blah, we need proof...

[Coderedpl]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

i got two WD 74 gig hard drivers set at raid 0 configuration and my game loads faster then with one now

[Xicer]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

Bump

and

Does anyone where i can get some good optical drvies that use SATA?

[]UK-C[ Mindzai]

Re: Want to be first on a map ? get SATA

Nonsense. The difference between SATA150 (SATA1) and IDE133 is negligible. Maybe the next generation SATA2 will be noticeably faster but SATA1 certainly is not. My game is installed on an IDE drive and I am first one the map more often than not. It is just another marketing gimmick. If you want performance increase you need to set up your drives in a RAID configuration or buy a 10K RPM or 15K RPM drive.

SATA drives are nice because they reduce the cable clutter in your case and not because they are faster, they are not.

Cant believe it took 5 posts before someone who knows what theyre talking about corrected this nonsense advice!