S-ATA on P4C800 Deluxe w/ XP SP1: why UltraDMA 5?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ted Miller
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Ted Miller

P4C800 running XP Pro SP1. I have one older UDMA/66 drive plugged into the
PRI_IDE and one S-ATA drive plugged into SATA1. (I'm not using the raid
connectors.)

Windows XP shows the S-ATA drive running in UDMA Mode 5. AFAIK this is the
100 MB/s mode. Is this normal? I notice that the SouthBridge IDE controller
supports only up to UDMA/100 and not UDMA/133 -- is this somehow limiting
the S-ATA drives as well? I'm confused about how this is all supposed to
work, should there be some special driver to get maximum performance out of
the S-ATA drives -- if so I can't find it on the Asus CD that came with the
motherboard.

On the other hand, there *is* a driver you can install for the Promise RAID
controller running in non-RAID mode. Would I get better performance by
plugging the lone S-ATA drive into SATA_RAID1 and configuring things in the
BIOS so that the Promise controller runs in non-raid mode?

Thanks for any insights.
 
Ted Miller said:
P4C800 running XP Pro SP1. I have one older UDMA/66 drive plugged into the
PRI_IDE and one S-ATA drive plugged into SATA1. (I'm not using the raid
connectors.)

Windows XP shows the S-ATA drive running in UDMA Mode 5. AFAIK this is the
100 MB/s mode. Is this normal? I notice that the SouthBridge IDE controller
supports only up to UDMA/100 and not UDMA/133 -- is this somehow limiting
the S-ATA drives as well? I'm confused about how this is all supposed to
work, should there be some special driver to get maximum performance out of
the S-ATA drives -- if so I can't find it on the Asus CD that came with the
motherboard.

On the other hand, there *is* a driver you can install for the Promise RAID
controller running in non-RAID mode. Would I get better performance by
plugging the lone S-ATA drive into SATA_RAID1 and configuring things in the
BIOS so that the Promise controller runs in non-raid mode?

Thanks for any insights.
Click to expand...

Ignore it. SATA doesn't have any UDMA modes - they're a throwback to IDE.
 
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