I'm Not Impressed with SATAII

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nobody Important
  • Start date Start date
N

Nobody Important

I have a new AMD 4.2 Dual with three SATA II drives from different
companies.

Anyway, running XP Pro with all the latest updates and have tried Cacheman
and O&O cache to see if I could get a bit more throughput from the drives.
Any basic tips to speed things up? One HD benchmark said I was getting
16Megs per second. Shouldn't it be faster than that?
 
The question begs to be asked............what mobo and chipset??? What does
it say under Device Manager??
Look for the program called HD Tach..........and run the speed test with it
and then compare the results with the database.
peter
 
The theoretical speed of SATA II is higher than that.

But, one rarely achieves the theoretical in the real world.

Disk transfers can also be limited by at least (1) motherboard buss speed,
(2) rotational speed of hard drive, (3) load on RAM, but not by RAM speed on
any modern PC, (4) antivirus, if it does scan on access, which is common for
Norton and McAfee, (5) the program doing the copying (e.g., XCOPY vs Windows
Explorer), (6) possibly by fragmentation of the hard drive, but not likely
unless very badly fragmented.
 
I forgot to mention that file size can significantly impact copying speed.
One file of size 1M will copy a lot faster than 1000 files of 1K each.
 
Actually SATA II posted speeds are'nt even available in todays pc,the
other hardware (controllers,etc) wont achieve those speeds,most all still
run the 150mb transfer rate (max)...As for running single SATA hds,youre
speeds will not run much better than IDE hds,once SATA is run in RAID,all
the speeds change.To see results,go
to:http://www.intel.com/performance/desktop/platform_technologies/storage_performance.htm
Once viewed,you might be impressed with SATA/RAID
 
Nobody said:
I have a new AMD 4.2 Dual with three SATA II drives from different
companies.

Anyway, running XP Pro with all the latest updates and have tried Cacheman
and O&O cache to see if I could get a bit more throughput from the drives.
Any basic tips to speed things up? One HD benchmark said I was getting
16Megs per second. Shouldn't it be faster than that?
Click to expand...

If you drove a Model T Ford on the the Daytona International Speedway and
failed to turn 200 MPH laps, would you be unimpressed by Daytona? Most folks
would recognize that the car, not the racetrack, limited the speed.

SATA is analogous to the racetrack, and the HD is analogous to the Model T:
the specified limit to SATA-I/II is 1.5/3 Gb/s (150/300 MB/s), but none of
the currently shipping HDs can sustain transfers even close to those SATA
peak bandwidth limits.

As to the 16 MB/s you achieved with some (unstated) benchmark -- you should
know that benchmarks, even many so-called disk benchmarks, do not actually
measure raw HD performance. Personally, I only fully trust HDtach, since
the results it shows correlate well with the vendor's specs; HDtune also
seems to display correct data, although I've used it far less.
 
Nobody said:
I have a new AMD 4.2 Dual with three SATA II drives from different
companies.

Anyway, running XP Pro with all the latest updates and have tried Cacheman
and O&O cache to see if I could get a bit more throughput from the drives.
Any basic tips to speed things up? One HD benchmark said I was getting
16Megs per second. Shouldn't it be faster than that?
Click to expand...

Start with HDTach.

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

When the interface to the disk is operating properly, the HDTach benchmark
result should be a tilted line. The bandwidth is highest at the beginning
of the disk, and lowest at the end of the disk. With a 7200RPM disk, I'd
be looking for 60MB/sec or more at the beginning, and 40MB/sec or more at
the end of the disk.

If you are seeing a "flat line" on the chart, for your performance, that
could mean the interface is in a slower mode. In Windows, that can happen
if CRC errors are detected. Windows will "downshift" the interface to a
slower speed, on the theory that the CRC errors might stop if the
interface runs slower. Given enough downshifts, you end up in PIO mode
(polled transfer - around 4MB/sec).

If the SATA cable was bad, the connectors were bad (flaky contact), or
the disk and the motherboard don't like one another, those could be
reasons for the downshift.

Paul
 
Back
Top