[Pc_Support] External SATA bracket ($9), external SATA enclosure/power ($35)

[Damien McKenna]

Jason Boxman wrote:
> That's not all that was said.  It was also discussed that 
> having two disks on the same ATA cable and moving data between
> each disk doesn't suffer much of a penalty versus the source
> and target disks being on different ATA ports altogether.

That's if a) all of the drives support NCQ (Native Command Queuing), b)
your controller supports NCQ, c) your OS+drivers supports NCQ.  Oh, and
its Serial-ATA only, no Parallel ATA ("regular" ATA drives).  So far
most/all onboard SATA controllers do *not* support NCQ so you're wasting
your breath with it unless you spend $20-30 on a 3rd party card.

> Yes, I understand that.  So what's the practical overhead of 
> having two ATA devices in UDMA mode 5 on the same port copying
> data amongst each other?

See above.  Not possible.

> What about if you had two mainboard ATA ports, with four disks,
> and you had two RAID 1 mirrors and you RAID 0 stripped them?

Bye-bye CPU, bye-bye I/O. :-)

Damien