pt121984

Hello all.

Have a funny issue I thought I'd run past you. My P4 3.4 system is running two SATA 1 seagate drives. One is an 80GB and the other is a 160GB drive. The mother board is an Asus P5GDC Deluxe with 1GB of ram and a Plextor SATA DVD burner. I use Passmark Performance test to test the drives to make sure they are up to speed. On this P4 I get approx. 50MB/sec Sequential read and 51/sec Sequential write speeds by all accounts is just fine. No Raid and is setup in bios as Enhanced IDE as it should be. I have no problems with this system.

However, I just assembled a Core2 Duo 2.4GH system with an Asus P5B Deluxe board with 2GB of ram. I have two Seagate Sata2 drives. One is a 250GB and the other is a 320GB drive. This is a SATA2 board with SATA2 drives. I would have expected at the very least to have the same performance, but I don't. I have the latest 1101 bios loaded and both the systems have WinXP Home SP2. On this new system I'm getting 65MB/sec Sequential write, but only getting 39MB/sec sequential read on either of the drives. Now, I'm getting a little faster write times on the SATA2 drive which are what you would think, but the read times are much slower. I tried disconnecting the secondary drive and just running the boot drive, but get the same performance. I would have thought the SATA2 system would be at least as fast or maybe a little faster, but not slower.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Patrick

geek73

When installing the Drives did you take the jumper off that says force SATA1 speeds? Alot of SATA 2 drives come with that jumper on already.. Dont know why but they do.

pt121984

Only jumpers on the back of these drives are for factory use only, nothing in relation to forcing Sata 1.

Thanks
Patrick

geek73

In the back of the drive, there should be little pins.. And a little plastic piece covering a couple.. All SATA 2 drives have a setting for Force SATA 150 speeds..

Kalim

Interesting.
I get 50MB/s S.Read and 45MB/s S.Write in the same program, with a 7200RPM 100MB/s PATA IDE drive with an AMD 1.3GHz.

Speeds depend on the data size used. If the data is small, just to be able to be handled by the cache alone, then that will not be a true indication of performance.

The better test to run is HDTach 3.0.1.0 and Sandra Lite:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/HDTach_d672.html
http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.ht...264&langx=en&a

Run them with both systems and then see how they fair. The main thing you're after is "sustained transfer rate", rather than burst.

The fact that you get 65MB/s shows to me that you may be running in SATA II for some reason.

Also note, 300MB/s and 150MB/s are the theoretical bus limits, not the actual drive performances. They have that bandwidth capability if needed, that is all.

pt121984

Would it be any advantage to me if I just re-installed XP and tried the AHCI controllers instead.? Unfortunately, Intel doesn't supply any updated drivers for the controllers other then the Matrix Storage Manager software, but these are only for if you are running the AHCI or in Raid mode. Why do they do this?


Thanks
Patrick

linderman

youd be wasting your time reinstalling windows


what are your results with HDtach then compare them to some other members drives at the very top of the Hard Drive Forum Section

HD Tach Scores

pt121984

Ok, installed HD Tach.

This is what I get on the new system, I haven't tested my older system yet.

Random Access 13.2 ms
CPU Utilization 3%
Average Read Speed 68.1MB/s
Burst 233.7 MB/s although on the second test it went down to 220 MB/s

The slave drive is just a little slower, but not by much at all.

Thanks
Patrick

linderman

those are great results ???????????



hell they rival the WD raptor if I am not mistaken ??????

pt121984

Well, I guess I feel a little better about HD performance then. The drives did however have the Sata 1 jumpers on them and I removed them, but the Passmark only yielded an additional 2 MB/s, so I was not happy. These tests however seem to be much better.

Thanks
Patrick