Serial ATA...hopeful improvement?

Ok, now that we've all figured out that ATA66 isn't much faster than ATA33 for real usage and ATA100 isn't much faster than ATA66, is Serial ATA really going to be faster than Ultra160 SCSI and give a good portion of the rated speed, or is it just adding insult to ATA100 injury? I've got quad ATA100 drives right now (not in a waste of time IDE RAID setup) and pretty disappointed with performance...all four are 7200rpm Deskstars w/ 2 meg cache etc etc etc, but still not much more than 20 megs a second even on a good day. Don't want to spend money on an Ultra160 SCSI card if Serial ATA is going to be all its supposed to be...

Thanks for any input -

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"It is better to keep your mouth closed and look stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt."

~Famous Dead Guy

Probably not. Tom's Hardware covered it in this article http://www.tomshardware.com/business...24/idf-01.html
SCSI is the usually way to go if you have to have the absolute best (and can afford it).

It won't benefit any individual drives right now, but if you look back there are some drives that saturate ATA33. If you have a couple such drives being accessed simultaneously then I don't see why you wouldn't gain some benefit. I agree with you though that a system won't see any dramatic speed increase.

but still not much more than 20 megs a second even on a good day

Wow that is pretty bad. I get usually 40-50 and spikes above 88

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PIII-800@ 1002mhz
Asus CULS2 mobo
512mb Micron ram
46.1gig ata-100 IBM hdd
30.1gig ata-100 IBM hdd
30.1gig ata-100 IBM hdd
Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI 32MB
Sound Blaster Live! 1024
Kenwood 72x Cd-Rom
Ricoh CD-RW 6/4/32
8x Toshiba DVD-Rom
Linksys LNE100TX nic card
Running WinMe,Win2k,and Whislter

Even if it did not improve speed at all, I'm all for having those much smaller serial ATA cables, which wouldn't clutter up my case nearly as much.

Want a really cleared out case? Grab a SCSI card and an external bay & put all your drives in there. same speed, no cables in the way. I have an external bay that I use for my old SCSI drives, and it's great.

-bZj

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.sig: coming soon to a post near you!

Well frig. Smaller cabling is nice, but some of the lamer magazines (can we say MacAddict?) have been hyping on Serial ATA as the savior of the IDE interface and I was sort of hoping there would be at least a little bit of truth to it. Oh well, time to hunt down a good SCSI card...

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"It is better to keep your mouth closed and look stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt."

~Famous Dead Guy