[kwlug-disc] Data transfer speeds SATA to SATA

[Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account)]

> On Sep 21, 2015, at 10:50 PM, William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>> The motherboard is a bit older (Socket 775/Core 2 generation), not sure if
>> an upgrade would help (I'd probably buy an inexpensive Socket FM2+), but if
> 
> Forget AMD.  Go with Intel.

While I too prefer Intel over AMD, I don’t think the CPU is actually doing much to help or hinder the transfers. Everything will be DMA’d from one buffer to another, with the CPU just minding the transfers and waiting for them to complete. 

If the buffering is set up poorly or the driver is interrupting after every block or something stupid like that it can certainly cause transfers between fast drives to be slow, but a fast CPU would punk out just as much as a slower one.

660Mbit/sec seems awfully slow to me, even for random writes on spinning rust. Almost every SATA driver takes advantage of elevator sorting and bursting, even with random writes.

-A.