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#11
SATA is the bus interface to your drive - using a SCSI device driver doesn't make your disk drive a SCSI drive. In fact, SATA drives are still getting issued ATA commands (which harken back to you parallel IDE drives btw - that is old technology), unless you use AHCI mode. SCSI isn't ancient and dead either. Enterprise drives now are SAS (Serial attached SCSI - the counterpart of SATA), which is pretty recent. In fact you can plug SATA drives into SAS ports.
The only problem I have found with the SCSI implementations like JMicron, Marvell, etc. are that there are some ATA commands you cannot issue (like changing the acoustic mode). Most all of the SCSI drivers for SATA now support SMART.
These manufacturers are just programming in a driver model they are comfortable with. And, in fact, if Windows actually recognizes and supports the device, like in the case of Marvell, you can use the windows SATA drivers instead.
Actually you can get upwards of 200 MB/s on SATA II. Most hard drives drives just can't do it. SSDs can and do. SATA II can support those speeds, the actual hardware cannot in most cases (the exceptions being SSDs or raid arrays). Don't believe everything you hear on you tube, that tech is just plain wrong. The reason it seems like improving interfaces have improved performance is that the disk drives themselves have improved along with the SATA interface spec, but have never been limited by the (current) SATA capability. That is in fact, what you want, the SATA capability to keep ahead of the drive capability.
Last edited by GeneO; 28 Feb 2011 at 10:41.