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Sata or ata?Follow
19 posts
Will it make a diffrence if i have Sata or ata? My HD is ata with buffer speed of 8mb/s and 5400 spindal speed. thanks for the help
As far as ATA goes, the 7200 rpm drives do a much better job and are dirt cheap these days. Personally, I have never had a single complaint with the cavier line from Western Digital and to date, I own about a dozen of them. (I have never had a failure and I tend to work them pretty hard.)
But, if you can afford it and your MB is set up for it the SATA drives are really amazing.
As to how much of a difference you will see, I think that is at least somewhat dependent onyour stats for FSB, CPU and a host of other things.
All that said, SATA, (and SATA II), is the future. (Until something else even better comes along, anyway!)
But, if you can afford it and your MB is set up for it the SATA drives are really amazing.
As to how much of a difference you will see, I think that is at least somewhat dependent onyour stats for FSB, CPU and a host of other things.
All that said, SATA, (and SATA II), is the future. (Until something else even better comes along, anyway!)
19 posts
my cpu is amd athlon 3200+ with 512kb fsb, will my 5400 ata hd run eq2 allright? or will it be super laggy?
Hard drives have nothing to do with your ability to play the game. Only if it is completly full and is 10 years old, will there be any noticable problems.
The things that make or break playability is RAM, video card, and CPU.
You got the CPU beat, so work on RAM. Have at least 1GB ram, 2GB if you can afford it.
Make sure your video card is at least 128MB and supports the shading requirements in the specs.
The things that make or break playability is RAM, video card, and CPU.
You got the CPU beat, so work on RAM. Have at least 1GB ram, 2GB if you can afford it.
Make sure your video card is at least 128MB and supports the shading requirements in the specs.
The hard drive speed MIGHT make zoning abit faster, but it is really not a big factor. I have 2 pc's set up to play eq2 and my main pc has the ata 133/7200rpg while my other is ata100. The other PC is slightly slower but it also has a geforce 3 video card compared to my main pc having geforce fx 5600. The other PC is also a athlon 1700 with a nforce 2 MB and my main pc is a athlon 64 3000+ in a Nforce 3 MB. They both have the same amount of ram (same name brand and speed). But anyways yea the HD doesn't make a huge difference, in fact the only speed I really notice between the PC's is walking through town I don't lag down on my main PC and I figure that is mostly due to the video card.
Hi
Well, I'll jump into this:
If your motherboard has an embedded SATA controller, its worth it to go SATA rather than ATA100/133. Not per-se from the burst transfer speed, but more because modern SATA drives are 7200 RPM AND they have cache algorithms for read ahead and write back cache. Assuming your drives are defragged frequently, at least weekly, you WILL see a speed advantage. Defrag, anti virus, AND Everquest II are all sped up on my rig vs ATA100; I attribute this to a combination of disk drive caching algorithms and the better firmware support. SATA is full duplex for acknowledgement of controller commands; there is no potential for the bus to wake up in a lower speed if you have two drives on the same channel (in which case clocking on that IDE/ATAPI channel is according to the SLOWEST of the two drives), when either drive is not UDMA capable (this matters mostly for older CD_ROMs, not the later rewriteables.)
I was a benchmark engineer 5 years, a compatibility lab manager 5 years, a PCI bus engineer 3 years, and a network engineer 4 years. All in all, my preference at this time is for Hitachi (formerly IBM) SATA drives, either in SATA-II or SATA-I (it doesn't really matter, they auto-negotiate according to your motherboard controller). Hitachi SATA drives can be tweaked a little more than others with a downloadable utility.
Caveats and gotchas: Stock Win XP SP1 and earlier flat out won't see the SATA drive controller WITHOUT AN ADD-IN DRIVER at boot time. Instead, if you want to make the SATA drive your boot OS drive, boot the Win XP CD from the CD and press F6 when it prompts you if you have any "add in SCSI controllers". You sort-of do, from their driver perspective. You then get to insert a floppy disk with the "RAID" driver for your embedded SATA controller. Of course, you'll want to make that before hand. Your install can now proceed normally, you wont need the disk again. Or, boot with XP SP2 and skip that. Nice.
EQ 2 has a lot of files that can be read, especially sound .VPK files and textures for your zone. You'll see zone loading improvements, but you should defrag your hard disk every so often to optimize the value of read-ahead disk caching at the drive firmware. It makes a huge difference defragging and running Anti-Virus checking, to have the read-ahead enabled.
Flame if you like, but the issue isn't burst transfer, its caching, mechanical rotation latency, and OS driver support that makes the SATA controller a better way to go. My opinion.
- GS
Edited, Thu Jan 19 10:17:18 2006 by DobriyIvan
If your motherboard has an embedded SATA controller, its worth it to go SATA rather than ATA100/133. Not per-se from the burst transfer speed, but more because modern SATA drives are 7200 RPM AND they have cache algorithms for read ahead and write back cache. Assuming your drives are defragged frequently, at least weekly, you WILL see a speed advantage. Defrag, anti virus, AND Everquest II are all sped up on my rig vs ATA100; I attribute this to a combination of disk drive caching algorithms and the better firmware support. SATA is full duplex for acknowledgement of controller commands; there is no potential for the bus to wake up in a lower speed if you have two drives on the same channel (in which case clocking on that IDE/ATAPI channel is according to the SLOWEST of the two drives), when either drive is not UDMA capable (this matters mostly for older CD_ROMs, not the later rewriteables.)
I was a benchmark engineer 5 years, a compatibility lab manager 5 years, a PCI bus engineer 3 years, and a network engineer 4 years. All in all, my preference at this time is for Hitachi (formerly IBM) SATA drives, either in SATA-II or SATA-I (it doesn't really matter, they auto-negotiate according to your motherboard controller). Hitachi SATA drives can be tweaked a little more than others with a downloadable utility.
Caveats and gotchas: Stock Win XP SP1 and earlier flat out won't see the SATA drive controller WITHOUT AN ADD-IN DRIVER at boot time. Instead, if you want to make the SATA drive your boot OS drive, boot the Win XP CD from the CD and press F6 when it prompts you if you have any "add in SCSI controllers". You sort-of do, from their driver perspective. You then get to insert a floppy disk with the "RAID" driver for your embedded SATA controller. Of course, you'll want to make that before hand. Your install can now proceed normally, you wont need the disk again. Or, boot with XP SP2 and skip that. Nice.
EQ 2 has a lot of files that can be read, especially sound .VPK files and textures for your zone. You'll see zone loading improvements, but you should defrag your hard disk every so often to optimize the value of read-ahead disk caching at the drive firmware. It makes a huge difference defragging and running Anti-Virus checking, to have the read-ahead enabled.
Flame if you like, but the issue isn't burst transfer, its caching, mechanical rotation latency, and OS driver support that makes the SATA controller a better way to go. My opinion.
- GS
Edited, Thu Jan 19 10:17:18 2006 by DobriyIvan
DobriyIvan to the rescue, as usual. :)
Question for you about your comment concerning Anti-Virus software. I've gotten in the habit during loading EQ2 to right-click and disable the Norton Antivirus icon on the lower right.
I've assumed that it will reduce some of the background programs running and improve speed and playability. Of course this was an assumption with no valid info to back it up.
Does disabling anti-virus software help or should I keep it on?
By the way, more than once I've been in a serious fight, only to suddenly lock up in lag. What's that new button down there? Virus scan on my computer? NOW?! Blast!
Question for you about your comment concerning Anti-Virus software. I've gotten in the habit during loading EQ2 to right-click and disable the Norton Antivirus icon on the lower right.
I've assumed that it will reduce some of the background programs running and improve speed and playability. Of course this was an assumption with no valid info to back it up.
Does disabling anti-virus software help or should I keep it on?
By the way, more than once I've been in a serious fight, only to suddenly lock up in lag. What's that new button down there? Virus scan on my computer? NOW?! Blast!
Norton Anti Virus is very bandwidth consuming, and has considerable memory overhead while its running. Regretably, its also difficult to completely turn off.
I use AVG from Grisoft, which is free, possibly not as thorough but has very low overhead. It still lags the PC considerably when a scan is going, especially for EQ2. Its not bad if I was just browsing.
I use AVG from Grisoft, which is free, possibly not as thorough but has very low overhead. It still lags the PC considerably when a scan is going, especially for EQ2. Its not bad if I was just browsing.
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