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New to SATA--which controller?
Occasioned by the abrupt failure of my boot HD the other day, I've taken the serial plunge and bought a brand new Seagate 250 GB SATA drive which I'm anxious to install and try out in my Athlon64 box running 64-bit FC3. However, I have a question first. My motherboard has two separate sets of SATA ports (conveniently placed on different parts of the board and color-coded differently). One set is next to the southbridge (VIA VT8237) and connected directly to it; the other is next to and connected to a Promise 20378 controller.
Given that the Promise controller shares the PCI bus with everything else while the VT8237's built-in SATA (presumably) has its own dedicated bus, I'd expect the VIA SATA to be markedly faster. However, the (Windows) benchmarks I have found on the web for this motherboard show the two controllers to be very similar in performance, with the Promise marginally faster than the VIA in many cases. I don't get it. Am I greatly overestimating the ability of one or two hard drives to saturate a PCI bus, or am I completely wrong as to how these devices are connected (my knowledge of PC hardware is pretty dim and vague)? Just what makes one SATA controller faster than another, anyway?
In any case, which controller would people recommend using for my system? (A general-purpose desktop and hacking workstation for which I value reliability rather higher than maxed-out blazing-fast performance) What I would normally do in this case is sourcedive the kernel and examine the respective drivers* for warning signs of ghetto hardware (e.g. lengthy quirk tables) but, not having a bootable machine at the moment, this is not possible. Unless there's a browsable kernel tree somewhere on the web that I'm unaware of, which I could access from this public terminal...
* Yes, I'm geek enough to have done this when evaluating prospective hardware purchases.
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