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All about Interfaces

All about Interfaces  

Well, I will start blogging with a bundle of questions. All these questions are about interfaces. How many interfaces does a pc have? USB, PCI, VGA, PCIE IDE, SATA…etc I don’t know. If you know, please tell me. Moreover, if you know anything about PCIE or SATA interface, do tell me. What is the bottleneck of a video card? And what is the bottleneck of a HDD? Okay, if you know the answer, tell me again. I will share my thoughts on these topics. And if I said something wrong, please correct me. Thank you in advance again and again.

Here we go.

My answer will be “no”, the interface is not the bottleneck of video card and HDD.

 

Let me start from PCIE. I don’t know much about how video card work. But pcie 2.0 can throughout 16GB/s. that is awesome. But the truth is the external interface is not a key factor of a good video card. Even the PCI E 1.0 can perform very well in the games or other applications. I have spent 3days to read about an article about the PCI E 2.0 in tom’s hardware. So if you have the same interest like me, okay, you can visit it here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2-0,1915.html  will you come to the same conclusion like me?

 

As for HDD, It is more interesting. The internal transfer rate and the external transfer rate are totally different things. Yes, most of HDDs have average internal read rates are no more than 100MB/s, so the SATA 2.0 can never be the bottleneck. But I have heard that some RAID 0 disks can write data at an average rate of 567.9 MB/s.

 

http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/hard_drives/SAS/seagate/cheetah15K.6_450gb/p4.asp

 Wow, so the interface must be a bottleneck of the HDD at that circumstance. But the truth is that Most of the time, a HDD will never saturate a SATA 1 interface. But the new interfaces do provide some possibilities. With its high speed transfer rate, we do benefit in RAID or other applications. Moreover, if someday we develop a new tech to speed up internal transfer rate of the HDD, the interface will be saturated or overloaded. I hope this will happen in the future. : D it is better to provide what we don’t need in advance as the old saying goes like “before it is too late”.  And we believe that we do use all the bandwidth it can provide us if HDD will not be replaced by SSD in the future. God bless HDD.

 

It really gives a feeling that you are allowed to drive your car at the full speed in high way, but the sad truth is that your car is a junk which can’t run that fast. So drive your car slowly and enjoy your journey.

i need your input, so tell me what you think about it. 

 

 

Posted: Friday, August 08, 2008 8:38 AM by intelguy

Comments

root said:

Interesting post! Just wanted to clarify something though...

When you see SATA connected drives in an array doing over 100MB/s, you have to understand that each drive is doing a percentage of that and SATA is point to point technology. So one SATA interface can supply you either theoretical 150MB or 300MB (depending which version you have) but a drive will only output ~65MB/s (READ or WRITE... average).

The only way to saturate SATA interface right now is using 1 sata cable, port multiplying, and around 4 drives in RAID0 off of that one port.

Note that this is only for drives directly connected to the motherboard. If they are connected to a PCI, PCI-X, or PCI-Express then you may saturate the PCI* bus depending on how many drives you have.

Clear as mud?

# August 10, 2008 5:21 PM

intelguy said:

plain as day indeed lol

# August 24, 2008 1:42 PM
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