Hi,
I just bought a tailor made PC Workstation based on the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard (875P Chipset), together with a 512MB DDR Dual Channel Kingstone memory, Intel Pentium 4 2.66C (800 Mhz FSB).
The Motherboard has 2 Serial ATA ports originating from the intel chipset and two additional RAID/IDE ports from the promise 378 S-ATA on board controler.
I originaly bought the system with an IBM/Hitachi DeskStar IDE drive 120GB, 7200rpm, 8MB Cache. When I got the replacment Maxtor DiamondStar 9 Plus S-ATA 120GB drive I thought I was in for a performence boots.
When I installed the drive the first thing I noticed is it was very noisy compared to the IBM one, much much louder.
I then reinstalled WinXP SP1 + all updates from Windows update, after attaching the Maxtor drive to one of the Promise S-ATA ports configures as IDE.
I meassured both drives using SISOFT SANDRA and got 29K for the IBM, 31-34K for the maxtor who refused to give a more stable result no matter how many times I ran it.
On the fresh installation I waiting for the system to start and relax and then launched a copy of Internet Explorer, it took 8 seconds before it opened.
I replaced the drives and booted from the IBM drive, launched explorer and it opened up in less than a second.
I remind you the IBM installation is 1-2 weeks old while the Maxtor installation in 24 hours old.
I repeated the "overall system feeling" test with a copy of photoshop 7 and Maya 5. in both cases the Maxtor drive was significantly slower than the IBM drive.
It was my intention to use Serial ATA drives as a means to up system perfomence, in effect the system was feeling much slower and less responsive. don't get me wrong it is still not very very slow, it is just slower than the older technology and allegedly slower IBM drive. The system became less responsive.
I decided to give it another try, I got updated drivers to all componnets on my Motherboard, run Maxtor utilities to disable Acustic Mode, and earased it, partition and format it to NTFS , XP mode, with MaxBlast 3 Floppy edition.
Also, I disabled the Promise controler in the BIOS and attached the Maxtor drive to one of the on board Intel based S-ATA ports. In the BIOS, I set the drive to UDMA6 and 32-bit On.
I then installed a fresh copy of WinXP, this time with no need for special drivers. When the installation was over I was happy again.
XP was fast, the drive was much quieter, and Internet Explorer launched in less then half a second. This was back to performence road. I ran Photoshop 7 and Maya 5 and all launched faster, I expected it to outperforme the IDE IBM drive, but I was happy I got the same performence back.
I ran SISOFT SANDRA and got 38000, WOW! much better.
I started to install my various software application, hooked up a second IDE drive, just to copy my data from (about 30-40GB)
With each installation and with each file copy point, I rebooted and tested how long Explorer takes to launch and SISOFT Sandra test. I was happy.
Finally, I formated teh second IDE drive I was copying from and went to sleep.
In the morning I woke up and it was slow again, I shutdown, removed the second IDE, the system had only the S-ATA drive on it own and two CD-ROM drive on another IDE drive.
Internet Explorer took 8 seconds to launch, SI SOFT SANDRA reported 34K, everything felt sluggish again.
I also defragged my drive, but it did not help.
I have two partitions, 20GB and 100GB, it was formated with NTFS using MaxBlast.
BIOS is set to UDMA6, but windows and SISOFT SANDRA reports it as UDMA5 (Asus says it is a microsoft bug), anyway it said UDMA5 when it was 38K and when it is 31K.
I have no idea what is the reason behind that, maybe my drive is faulty, maybe I am doing something wrong.
bottom line, I bought the more expensvie, faster and modern-technlogy drive and got slower overall perfomence.
please advice.
thanks
I just bought a tailor made PC Workstation based on the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard (875P Chipset), together with a 512MB DDR Dual Channel Kingstone memory, Intel Pentium 4 2.66C (800 Mhz FSB).
The Motherboard has 2 Serial ATA ports originating from the intel chipset and two additional RAID/IDE ports from the promise 378 S-ATA on board controler.
I originaly bought the system with an IBM/Hitachi DeskStar IDE drive 120GB, 7200rpm, 8MB Cache. When I got the replacment Maxtor DiamondStar 9 Plus S-ATA 120GB drive I thought I was in for a performence boots.
When I installed the drive the first thing I noticed is it was very noisy compared to the IBM one, much much louder.
I then reinstalled WinXP SP1 + all updates from Windows update, after attaching the Maxtor drive to one of the Promise S-ATA ports configures as IDE.
I meassured both drives using SISOFT SANDRA and got 29K for the IBM, 31-34K for the maxtor who refused to give a more stable result no matter how many times I ran it.
On the fresh installation I waiting for the system to start and relax and then launched a copy of Internet Explorer, it took 8 seconds before it opened.
I replaced the drives and booted from the IBM drive, launched explorer and it opened up in less than a second.
I remind you the IBM installation is 1-2 weeks old while the Maxtor installation in 24 hours old.
I repeated the "overall system feeling" test with a copy of photoshop 7 and Maya 5. in both cases the Maxtor drive was significantly slower than the IBM drive.
It was my intention to use Serial ATA drives as a means to up system perfomence, in effect the system was feeling much slower and less responsive. don't get me wrong it is still not very very slow, it is just slower than the older technology and allegedly slower IBM drive. The system became less responsive.
I decided to give it another try, I got updated drivers to all componnets on my Motherboard, run Maxtor utilities to disable Acustic Mode, and earased it, partition and format it to NTFS , XP mode, with MaxBlast 3 Floppy edition.
Also, I disabled the Promise controler in the BIOS and attached the Maxtor drive to one of the on board Intel based S-ATA ports. In the BIOS, I set the drive to UDMA6 and 32-bit On.
I then installed a fresh copy of WinXP, this time with no need for special drivers. When the installation was over I was happy again.
XP was fast, the drive was much quieter, and Internet Explorer launched in less then half a second. This was back to performence road. I ran Photoshop 7 and Maya 5 and all launched faster, I expected it to outperforme the IDE IBM drive, but I was happy I got the same performence back.
I ran SISOFT SANDRA and got 38000, WOW! much better.
I started to install my various software application, hooked up a second IDE drive, just to copy my data from (about 30-40GB)
With each installation and with each file copy point, I rebooted and tested how long Explorer takes to launch and SISOFT Sandra test. I was happy.
Finally, I formated teh second IDE drive I was copying from and went to sleep.
In the morning I woke up and it was slow again, I shutdown, removed the second IDE, the system had only the S-ATA drive on it own and two CD-ROM drive on another IDE drive.
Internet Explorer took 8 seconds to launch, SI SOFT SANDRA reported 34K, everything felt sluggish again.
I also defragged my drive, but it did not help.
I have two partitions, 20GB and 100GB, it was formated with NTFS using MaxBlast.
BIOS is set to UDMA6, but windows and SISOFT SANDRA reports it as UDMA5 (Asus says it is a microsoft bug), anyway it said UDMA5 when it was 38K and when it is 31K.
I have no idea what is the reason behind that, maybe my drive is faulty, maybe I am doing something wrong.
bottom line, I bought the more expensvie, faster and modern-technlogy drive and got slower overall perfomence.
please advice.
thanks