The 9100 is SATA 150.  There's no performance difference between SATA 150 and SATA 3G for a single drive - or even a pair of RAID 0 drives.  Even a 10,000 rpm Raptor won't sustain more than about 70-75 MBps - - or half what the SATA 150 interface supports.

SATA 3G is yet another in a very long line of interface enhancements that supposedly solves a performance bottleneck that doesn't exist.  The spin speed of a drive is what limits its performance, not the interface bandwidth.

\ 1. Does the Dimension 9100 motherboard support SATA 2 at 3 Gbit/s, or will the new drives run at the slower 1.5 Gbit/s rate?

vivona 

SATA 2 hard drives can be installed in the 9100 without a problem, as they backwards compatible to SATA 1.

Bev.

Regarding the Dimension 9100. It uses an Intel 945 chipset which is supposed to be able to handle SATA 2. What is limiting it to SATA 1?

You may see some improvement vs. a  standard hard drive - more for the buffer than anything else.  The bottleneck is not the buffer to host -- it's the platter to buffer, which will limit your overall throughput to well below 150 MBPs.

According to the Western Digital Caviar Black spec sheet at http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701276.pdf  the ITB drive has a transfer speed from the buffer to host of 3Gb/s (375MBps) and a sustained transfer speed from the host to the drive of 106MBs.

Seems to me that anything coming from the 32MB buffer would benefit from the faster transfer speed of SATA 2. Also, the Caviar Black has dual processors which they claim will improve performance. Is all this just marketing hype, or shouldn't I see some performance improvement as compared to the original 160GB drive that shipped with the D9100?

Here is what I have determined so far:

My current drives are the original Seagate ST3160023AS with an 8MB buffer and sustained transfer rate of 58MB/s and a second drive, a Deskstar HDS722516VLSA80 with an 8MB buffer and 61.4MB/s sustained transfer rate. If I upgrade to WD Caviar Black drives that have 32MB buffers and sustained transfer rates of 106MB/s, I should see an improvement in boot-up time and faster file copy times, perhaps twice as fast if you just compare the improvement in transfer time. I don't see seek times anywhere in the WD Black online documentation, so if they are similar to the current drives, I won't see as much of an improvement in bootup and other seek-intensive functions. I haven't determined if the Intel 945 Chipset on the motherboard will run the proposed WD Black drives in SATA 2, but since all transfer rates are below 150MB/s, that is a moot point. Of course, I will certainly see a huge increase in storage space.

Comments?

Hi Vivona.  I am just wondering how you got a dual core processor in the 9100.  Does the motherboard support dual and quad core processors?  I have wanted to do this for a while, but have been told that it cannot be done.  Thanks!

JCMTemple

The Dual Core processor refered to, is a Pentium D, the Dimension 9100 does not support any Intel Core 2 Duo, or Core 2 Quad processors.

Bev.