Thanks once again Brink.
As we used to say, "you are a gentleman and a scholar." :)
Surely one chip handling all the SATA connectors must be a bottleneck.
If not, one could simply attach more connectors to the same circuit and gain extra benefits.
There must be a point where adding more drives to the same chip, reduces the performance.
I assume that server boards must have different chip sets, or multiple controllers.
I noticed that my HDDs only use about 20% of the theoretical bandwidth.
I get nowhere near 300MB/s out of my HDDs.
It's closer to 60 MB/s sustained, copying between SATA drives (with occasional bursts exceeding that).
Obviously there are mechanical limitations.
This leads to more questions:
Where does the SATA data clock rate come from?
Does the SATA controller have its own clock or is it based on the motherboard clock frequency?
Does reducing the motherboard clock frequency slow down SATA transfer speeds?
Where does RAID fit into this?
Do you (or anyone else) know of any good articles about these subjects?