A7N8X SATA Poor performance

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alex
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Alex

I have a A7N8X Deluxe ver.2.0 (BIOS 1006) with a 2600 processor and 512
PC3200 memory. The system has performed well until last week when I replaced
the IDE HD with a Western Digital SATA Drive. I used Ghost to copy the drive
and all went well but now I can see a big difference in performance. I can
tell that the bottleneck is HD access. It just takes much longer to access
the HD after switching to the SATA drive. Any ideas would be appreciated.
BTW, the driver ver. of the Silicon SATA is 1.0.0.32

Thanks
 
Alex said:
I have a A7N8X Deluxe ver.2.0 (BIOS 1006) with a 2600 processor and 512
PC3200 memory. The system has performed well until last week when I
replaced the IDE HD with a Western Digital SATA Drive. I used Ghost to
copy the drive and all went well but now I can see a big difference in
performance. I can tell that the bottleneck is HD access. It just takes
much longer to access the HD after switching to the SATA drive. Any ideas
would be appreciated. BTW, the driver ver. of the Silicon SATA is 1.0.0.32
Click to expand...

Output from a benchmark program such as hdtach would be great.

And confirmation of the trasnfer mode would be good too (sandra can do this)

Ben
 
Have you run any benchmarks, like HDtach?

I switched from an IBM 80GB harddrive to a Maxtor SATA 160GB drive recently.
My benches SOARED, but it still doesn't "feel" quite as fast as my good ol'
IBM.
 
OK, I used HD Tach and here are the numbers:
Random access time = 13.1
Read Burst Speed = 72.6
Seq. Speed = 32000
Read Max = 46676
Read Min = 25582
I don't know what these numbers mean but when I did the HD test on another
IDE drive, I noticed that the Read Burst Speed was higer, for example,
graeter than the scale which only goes to 80.

Thanks
 
Which WD drive do you use?
I assume you use XP?

In HDTach I get
Random Access: 13.5 ms
Read Burst Speed = 110
Seq.Speed = 47800
Read Max = 64000
Read Min = 26000

Maxtor Diamond Max 9 SATA 160GB 8mb cache
A7n8X Deluxe Rev1.04 Bios 1007
SI SATA driver 1.00.29
XP SP1


Alex said:
OK, I used HD Tach and here are the numbers:
Random access time = 13.1
Read Burst Speed = 72.6
Seq. Speed = 32000
Read Max = 46676
Read Min = 25582
I don't know what these numbers mean but when I did the HD test on another
IDE drive, I noticed that the Read Burst Speed was higer, for example,
graeter than the scale which only goes to 80.

Thanks
Click to expand...
 
Alex said:
OK, I used HD Tach and here are the numbers:
Random access time = 13.1
Read Burst Speed = 72.6
Seq. Speed = 32000
Read Max = 46676
Read Min = 25582
I don't know what these numbers mean but when I did the HD test on another
IDE drive, I noticed that the Read Burst Speed was higer, for example,
graeter than the scale which only goes to 80.
Click to expand...

Nothing especially bad there, it depends on the drive. My Raptor gets:

HD Tach version 2.61
Drive: WDC WD360GD-00FNA0 35.0
Access time: 9.3ms
CPU utilization: 7.7%
551 zones to be tested (65536kb zones).
Burst speed: 98196kps
Average read speed: 48633

But that is a 10 000RPM drive.

Maybe your burst is a little low, but you wouldn't notice the performance
difference. What was the CPU utilisation?

Ben
 
My CPU usage 9.3%
Also, I'm using Win XP Pro and the Western Digital 120 JD SATA Drive.

Thanks again to all who are responding.
 
Can't see any reason for poor performance...
Click to expand...

Now I am worried..

I'm about to go out and purchase two 120G SATA drives and set them up
as RAID1(mirroring, and might later try striped-mirroring) on this
mobo as backup is more important than speed at the moment. I do a lot
of web work and find it's more than a pain in the assets to contantly
do recursive backups twice a week (6.8G worth of backups) and can't
afford to lose my mail, stats and other stuff. So I'm planning on
ghosting the drives now and move everything over to the new config and
then use my fastest existing drive on the mobo ide channel for video
capturing.

I know I have to have the drivers on floppy to install them to the
system, and config the bios, is there anything else I should know
before proceeding?

Cheers
 
From a strictly hardware perspective, and with qualifier that the SATA
and PATA drives both have on-board caches of the same size then I
can't see why a serial ATA could be faster than a parallel drive. I
could see it being as fast, under certain conditions, such as when the
data is not in the cache, but in order for the actual disk to memory
transfer rate to be comparable, the SATA channel has got to be running
at 8 x 133MHz + a little more for overhead.

Arnie
 
Arnie said:
From a strictly hardware perspective, and with qualifier that the SATA
and PATA drives both have on-board caches of the same size then I
can't see why a serial ATA could be faster than a parallel drive. I
could see it being as fast, under certain conditions, such as when the
data is not in the cache, but in order for the actual disk to memory
transfer rate to be comparable, the SATA channel has got to be running
at 8 x 133MHz + a little more for overhead.
Click to expand...

What overhead? Parallel -> Serial -> Parallel? Surely thats only
(marginal) delay, rather than throughput reduction?

I also see no benefit in terms of performance with SATA over (parallel) ATA,
even with the ICH5 with full 150MB/s connection as the performance is
fundamentally limited by the mechanics, not the electronics.

Ben
 
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