Basically, I'm trying to ensure that my six year old system (Asus A8v deluxe and Athlon 64 dual core) can keep up with the current software until such time as the next generation of AMD processors become available.

Just installed an extra 1 GB (From 1 to 2 GB) of main memory and got a substantial performance improvement, in terms of the reduction of hard disk paging (Vista) and did so at minimal cost (£20).

Having done this, I'm now looking at Hard Disk performance

Currently using a 400GB Maxtor SATA II HD, but my system BIOS only supports SATA I and therefore I'm only running the Maxtor @ 150GB/sec transfer speed.

There have been no BIOS updates for some time, so I am doubtful whether the BIOS update route is available regarding obtaining support for SATA II. Is there a cheap way of getting SATA II support onto a system of this age, other than buying an expansion board ?

Second question, can an Athlon 64 dual core processor support Virtual Machine ? From what I've read the official spec says no. Again, I'm wondering whether there is a way round this ? Reason for asking is that I'm currently dual-booting Vista Ultimate 64 and XP professional 32 from separate parts of the partioned Maxtor HD and understand that under VM I may well be able to do away with the partition and run XP, which I only use occasionally to support games and hardware that Vista won't support, as a VM "Application" in Vista.

Nick

The biggest advantage of SATA II in my opinion is the NCQ support.

1.5Gbit SATA link is 187.5 MB/s. There is no way your average home drive is going to put that much data out unless it's got some very fast cache and everything you want is in there.

If you want to go the SATA II route, then I suggest buying a new motherboard with it, because dedicated hardware sata II cards are not cheap.

What would be worth doing though is putting a second hard disk in. On that put the VM images and on the primary disc put your host OS.

That way the VM isn't carrying out lots of disc access while the host OS is trying to too.

You're right.

I've just updated the Vista performance index table and its still showing memory as the bottle neck at 4.5, processor next at 4.9, graphics in the 5.2 - 5.4s and hard disk at 5.6 !

Guess all the extra memory did was to reduce the vitual memory paging to hard disk. And on the applications I run, I'm probably nowhere near the SATA 1 transfer capacity limit, although, if I was able to go VM that might be a consideration.

Looking at the web, the Sata II cards are mostly PCI-express and in the range £50-£75. Unfortunately, the expansions slots in the A8V are all original PCI, may even be sub version 2.00 ! There are some cheaper Chinese origin expansion boards on E-Bay that claim to be SATA II and PCI, but I can't see, if this were the case, how the increased throughput would get into the system - PCI-X and PCI express have more pins on the card and therefore would require more lines or a suitable 'plexer device on the board to cope. It would also need revised chipset software.

I think the A8v supports JBOD so that may be a way of implementing a sort of VM.

Nick

Edited 9 November, 200916 yr by Clunkclick

You're right.

I've just updated the Vista performance index table and its still showing memory as the bottle neck at 4.5, processor next at 4.9, graphics in the 5.2 - 5.4s and hard disk at 5.6 !

Guess all the extra memory did was to reduce the vitual memory paging to hard disk. And on the applications I run, I'm probably nowhere near the SATA 1 transfer capacity limit, although, if I was able to go VM that might be a consideration.

Looking at the web, the Sata II cards are mostly PCI-express and in the range £50-£75. Unfortunately, the expansions slots in the A8V are all original PCI, may even be sub version 2.00 ! There are some cheaper Chinese origin expansion boards on E-Bay that claim to be SATA II and PCI, but I can't see, if this were the case, how the increased throughput would get into the system - PCI-X and PCI express have more pins on the card and therefore would require more lines or a suitable 'plexer device on the board to cope. It would also need revised chipset software.

I think the A8v supports JBOD so that may be a way of implementing a sort of VM.

Nick

The SATA limit won't be the problem, because it's a point to point link, eg 1.5Gbits per drive and I can't think of any home drives that can put that data out.

You can't do a good PCI 32bit SATA II card, because the data rate of PCI (32bit 33Mhz) is less than 3Gbit and that is a shared bus.

JBOD stands for Just a Bunch Of Discs. It means the RAID controller you have on it can support you hanging a load of discs off it and not using RAID.

Honestly, you're not going to push enough data to flood SATA with the single disc, so just go with a second disc for the VM images (giving another 1.5Gbit link to that drive) or sit and wait it out for a new motherboard.

My hard disk max sustained throughput is 78MB/sec, so even with overheads that's not goiing to even slightly test the 1.5 SATA interface.

I'm wondering if Solid State drives might improve things slightly, but I'm not really prepared to pay anything like that money - Crucial's 128GB drive has a read rate of 250MB/s but also has a price to match (£263) and the cheapest, Kingston 128GB, only has a throughput of 100MB/sec.

Only other thought is can I uprate the processor ? Currently Athlon 64 Dual Core 4200. I know ther was talk a couple of years ago of AMD doing a quad core for a 939 Socket. Did anything come of it ?

nick

Edited 9 November, 200916 yr by Clunkclick

My hard disk max sustained throughput is 78MB/sec, so even with overheads that's not goiing to even slightly test the 1.5 SATA interface.

I'm wondering if Solid State drives might improve things slightly, but I'm not really prepared to pay anything like that money - Crucial's 128GB drive has a read rate of 250MB/s but also has a price to match (£263) and the cheapest, Kingston 128GB, only has a throughput of 100MB/sec.

Only other thought is can I uprate the processor ? Currently Athlon 64 Dual Core 4200. I know ther was talk a couple of years ago of AMD doing a quad core for a 939 Socket. Did anything come of it ?

nick

For your system an SSD is a waste of money IMHO.

Honestly, put a second hard disk in so you have the host OS and the VM images on separate discs and be happy with the RAM upgrade you have.

Then look around at the AMD offerings and Intel offerings in the new year.

I believe s939 has been closed off for a while now.

I use a 30gb SSD for Vista's OS partition on my general PC. Too costly otherwise. It makes quite a difference and cost £65 at the time. Access time is <> 1ms and happily sustains 120mb/sec .

As for VM , you need chip support for AMD-V or Intel VT to give you hardware hypervisor support.

IMHO SATA2 isn't going to make a big difference. In theory RAID 1 will give you better read times and RAID 0 better sustained transfer rates. However on cheap SATA disks I have never really found either to be advantageous other the the redundancy you get with RAID1 mirroring. The low end SATA raid cards ie less than 100 quid are software based anyway, requiring driver support.

With SCSI/SAS it's a different ballgame but then you will pay heavily for the disks and a decent controller.

FYI at home I use a HP ML115 (£200) which is quad core. 6gb RAM (£55) , using Ubuntu 64 bit, Sun Vbox and this happily runs Ubuntu , 2 Solaris 10 Vbox's and Windows 2003 server without any noticable disk performance issues. It has 2 x SATA 1 250gb (£40 each) drives as a software mirrored pair.

Have you tried Sun's Vbox - it's free and is very quick - see Downloads - VirtualBox

(I am a Sun Sys Admin BTW)

I use a 30gb SSD for Vista's OS partition on my general PC. Too costly otherwise. It makes quite a difference and cost £65 at the time. Access time is <> 1ms and happily sustains 120mb/sec .

As for VM , you need chip support for AMD-V or Intel VT to give you hardware hypervisor support.

IMHO SATA2 isn't going to make a big difference. In theory RAID 1 will give you better read times and RAID 0 better sustained transfer rates. However on cheap SATA disks I have never really found either to be advantageous other the the redundancy you get with RAID1 mirroring. The low end SATA raid cards ie less than 100 quid are software based anyway, requiring driver support.

With SCSI/SAS it's a different ballgame but then you will pay heavily for the disks and a decent controller.

FYI at home I use a HP ML115 (£200) which is quad core. 6gb RAM (£55) , using Ubuntu 64 bit, Sun Vbox and this happily runs Ubuntu , 2 Solaris 10 Vbox's and Windows 2003 server without any noticable disk performance issues. It has 2 x SATA 1 250gb (£40 each) drives as a software mirrored pair.

Have you tried Sun's Vbox - it's free and is very quick - see Downloads - VirtualBox

(I am a Sun Sys Admin BTW)

Erm yeah ok...

I assume you've got only the infrequently changed files on SSD and if not how do you deal with cell bit death.

FWIW you can just hang sata disks off a SAS controller, so I don't see why it's an issue and it's not like the low end SAS controller cards are that expensive.

Erm yeah ok...

I assume you've got only the infrequently changed files on SSD and if not how do you deal with cell bit death.

Only the OS. I have 3gb RAM so don't have a swapfile. Data is kept on a a cheap mechanical SATA 2 drives in RAID 1 via the onboard controller. As for wear levelling, yep, the device has a lifespan but then as do any disks. And as a precaution it's imaged off evey other month. But then I'd do that whether it was SSD or not. Needless to say it's worked faultlessly for 6 months so far and I have had one in my Netbook for over a year and that gets used daily, again without issue.

Erm yeah ok...

FWIW you can just hang sata disks off a SAS controller, so I don't see why it's an issue and it's not like the low end SAS controller cards are that expensive.

Agreed but depends on what you want to pay. For home I would consider any controller over £100 expensive. For that money, yes a decent enough SAS controller can be had. Seem to recollect HP do one for this sort of money.

Edited 12 November, 200916 yr by modra_vrs