SATA Clarification Requested

[Tanthalas]

Just bought my first SATA drives to put in a file server I'm building from some spares - would appreciate a few clarifications for a SATA virgin.  Stop me if I'm wrong.

1. The drives are SATA-II 7200rpm 16MB bad boys, 500GB a piece.  I want to put them in RAID 1 or RAID 10.
2. The system is a bit older than the drives (1.4Ghz Athlon Palomino!), so the interface card is going in through PCI.
3. Max transfer speed of PCI at that time, IIRC, is about 500MB/s.
4. SATA is 1.5Gb/s, SATA-II is 3Gb/s.  Or 150MB/s and 300MB/s, or something like that.  Other benefit of SATA-II is hot-swap - not needed!
5. The drives, even modern ones pushing in co-op, aren't going to shove out more than about 100MB/s.
6. For file transfers that also use the PCI bus to get to the NIC, the user pulling is only going to be able to take about 5MB/s max anyway.

All of which means I can buy a SATA-I RAID card for now, as SATA-II is 5 times the cash for little or no benefit.  And if/when I upgrade the server, the drives won't need replacing.

Am I right on all that?

TIA

[Charisma Bypass]

Wasn't the limit a fiver?   

[Tanthalas]

[JasonD]

PCI bus is your limit (133 MB/s, not 500), and multiple drives in raid could easily exceed that. No point even making, never mind buying an SATA-II card for a PCI interface.

BTW, SATA-II 7200RPM 16MB 500GB hasn't qualified as a bad boy for about two years.

[Tanthalas]

BTW, SATA-II 7200RPM 16MB 500GB hasn't qualified as a bad boy for about two years.

   Not getting 10000rpm ones - lower capacity and all that. And the 750GB ones cost a ruddy fortune!  I won't even fill 500GB for a while yet. I'd use SCSI, but the cost of 1TB in RAID compared to SATA is pretty high.

I double checked the PCI spec and you're right - 133MB/s for my cards.  It's the PCI 2.2 3.3v 66Mhz signalling ones that do 533MB/s peak, but that mobo will be using older slots than that.

Cheers.  I'll get myself an interface card ordered.