Q: P4C800-E Deluxe SATA Drive Appears As IDE3-Master, Why?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Clive Smith
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Clive Smith

Appologies in advance for my question - it is probably due to my ignorance,
but here goes :-

I have a 160Gb Maxtor SATA drive connected via a SATA connector to my
P4C800-E Deluxe board via the South Bridge controller, however it is
detected as IDE3-Master. In XP it appears as an IDE UDMA-5 device and UDAM-6
as I would expect (I know there was a similar thread about UDMA earlier but
I didn't fully understand it). I am not trying do any fancy RAID stuff, I
just want the 150 transfer rate.

Is there any way for this to be detected correctly as SATA or am I missing
something obvious?

On a totally different note, I also have 2Gb of RAM but Sisoft Sandra fails
on the memory bandwidth test with "Insufficient System Reources" - I have
read somewhere that it starts behaving funny when testing large amounts of
memory, has anyone else had this problem?

Look forward to your replies.

- Clive
 
no.email.address@ok said:
I didn't fully understand it). I am not trying do any fancy RAID stuff, I
just want the 150 transfer rate.
Click to expand...

You can't get a 150MBps transfer rate on any drive. The highest rate
yet measured is 60.5MBps, by the Hitachi 7k250. And that's the absolute
max, average would be down in the 50's. Don't be fooled by marketing
hype.
 
jaeger said:
You can't get a 150MBps transfer rate on any drive. The highest rate
yet measured is 60.5MBps, by the Hitachi 7k250. And that's the absolute
max, average would be down in the 50's. Don't be fooled by marketing
hype.
Click to expand...

I am not a hardware expert so I accept you assertion regarding the data
transfer rate. I'd still like to get to the bottom of why it is appearing as
IDE rather than SATA and the UDMA5 instead of UDMA6. This has got me
baffled.

- Clive
 
no.email.address@ok said:
I am not a hardware expert so I accept you assertion regarding the data
transfer rate. I'd still like to get to the bottom of why it is appearing as
IDE rather than SATA and the UDMA5 instead of UDMA6. This has got me
baffled.
Click to expand...

Because Windows doesn't know the difference, it's using it's own generic
IDE drivers. The drive interface is totally transparent to the OS. And
that's fine, the only thing you lose right now is hot-swapping.
Eventually they might write drivers that differentiate "SATA", but it
really isn't an issue at this point. Performance is the same.

The quick answer is that everything is normal.
 
jaeger said:
You can't get a 150MBps transfer rate on any drive. The highest rate
yet measured is 60.5MBps, by the Hitachi 7k250. And that's the absolute
max, average would be down in the 50's. Don't be fooled by marketing
hype.
Click to expand...

"Deskstar 7K250 can't do much about the WD Raptor with 10,000 rpm - its
advantages are too great because of the high spin rate. But if you take a
close look at the results of the two contenders in the individual tests, you
will see that the Raptor is clearly faster only in the I/O test and the
maximum transfer rates - in the other disciplines, Hitachi's 7K250 has
almost caught up."

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031001/hitachi_deskstar-06.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031001/hitachi_deskstar-04.html
 
"Deskstar 7K250 can't do much about the WD Raptor with 10,000 rpm - its
advantages are too great because of the high spin rate. But if you take a
close look at the results of the two contenders in the individual tests, you
will see that the Raptor is clearly faster only in the I/O test and the
maximum transfer rates - in the other disciplines, Hitachi's 7K250 has
almost caught up."

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031001/hitachi_deskstar-06.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031001/hitachi_deskstar-04.html
Click to expand...

I'm not going to bother clicking on those links, THG is incompetent.
But I'll guess they used IOMeter, which cannot be used to benchmark
desktop drives. The Raptors do have better application-level
performance, but the Hitachi has a faster max transfer rate regardless
of what Tom's buffoon squad says. Application performance vs. low-level
performance is entirely different topic, my only purpose in pointing out
the Hitachi's raw speed out was to illustrate how far drives have to go
to saturate SATA transfer limits.
 
this mobo with its raid setup is weard the ich5 only supports udma5 not 6
this made me very mad as i expected better support than this on this mobo.
my p4g8x deluxe has a sil3112a and this truelly suports udma6 and yes
windows recognizes it as udma6 raid.the raid contoller on the p4c800 dx the
PROMISE PDC20378 only supports udma 5 as it supports the ide raid too! i
think there p4c800-e dx also has a ichr5, 5 meaning udma 5 i think it is
cheap that they did this! i went out and got a silicone image raid card and
stuck it on the p4c800 dx i have, and windows picked it right up as udma 6
raid and the performace is much better with my raptors. well i hope this
helps you. been running raid sence the promise fastrak 66 came out and love
it.
 
jaeger said:
I'm not going to bother clicking on those links, THG is incompetent.
But I'll guess they used IOMeter, which cannot be used to benchmark
desktop drives. The Raptors do have better application-level
performance, but the Hitachi has a faster max transfer rate regardless
of what Tom's buffoon squad says. Application performance vs. low-level
performance is entirely different topic, my only purpose in pointing out
the Hitachi's raw speed out was to illustrate how far drives have to go
to saturate SATA transfer limits.
Click to expand...
Links?????????
Synthetic or otherwise
 
jaeger said:
I see you're still missing the entire point of my post, but here you go:

http://tinyurl.com/u19w

http://tinyurl.com/ubb7
Click to expand...
I didn't miss any points, good links, what does hdtach say?
I never considered the raptors cost effective, and was very impressed with
the last Hitachi/IBM replacement pata drive we received! There is my bias,
we lost hundreds of man hours with lost data on IBM 75/120 series drives
that failed in the last 2 years, they were DOGS!
In our small data sample of ~10 drives, we experienced a 80% failure rate!
What's the warranty for the new IBM's?
 
I didn't miss any points, good links, what does hdtach say?
I never considered the raptors cost effective, and was very impressed with
the last Hitachi/IBM replacement pata drive we received! There is my bias,
we lost hundreds of man hours with lost data on IBM 75/120 series drives
that failed in the last 2 years, they were DOGS!
In our small data sample of ~10 drives, we experienced a 80% failure rate!
What's the warranty for the new IBM's?
Click to expand...

My point was not to praise any particular model of drive, or to compare
the Hitachi to anything else. I picked it becasue it has the highest
measured STR of any drive reviewed by the only site that matters, to
illustrate that even the fastest SATA/IDE drive is nowhere near SATA
speed limits. It isn't even over ATA66 limits.
 
you now i have been reading this thread jeager and all of your postings are
very correct and your urls are the same one i read every night. i have been
running ide raid all my life and sence i got my p4g8x dx and my p4c800 dx
and my 4 seagates sata drives the reads and writes are outstanding. this is
very interesting though, i noticed when watching the drive benchmarks on ide
raid the bursts were very hi but then droped of dramatically and leveled out
even with 8 meg cash ide drives. to prove your point with sata drives this
doesnt happen because the pipeline is there and no restrictions are felt
with the total combined 16 meg cash and pipeline of sata the drop off after
burst in minimal! any raider would now this!
 
jaeger said:
You can't get a 150MBps transfer rate on any drive. The highest rate
yet measured is 60.5MBps, by the Hitachi 7k250. And that's the absolute
max, average would be down in the 50's. Don't be fooled by marketing
hype.
Click to expand...

Only half the truth ! 150MBs that sata can reach is used fully by many
drives as they empty thier cache hits !
true that the disk cant sustain a tranfsfer of 150MBs, but with the large
caches of 8 mb sata is faster than ata when the data is in the cache...

Lasse
Click to expand...
 
LasseREMOVETHIS@lundberg- said:
Only half the truth ! 150MBs that sata can reach is used fully by many
drives as they empty thier cache hits !
true that the disk cant sustain a tranfsfer of 150MBs, but with the large
caches of 8 mb sata is faster than ata when the data is in the cache...
Click to expand...

That is true. However, a full cache dump over an ATA66 bus would take a
tenth of a second. No bottleneck there.
 
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