ATA-5...damn it.

S

serialtoon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2007
Messages
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So yesterday i found out that my drives are running in ATA-5 which translates to data rates of up to 66Mb/sec. Is it possible that if i buy a ATA-6 card (100Mb/sec) i would see a significant increase in performance speeds? Last night i transfered over about 88 gigs of information (Using windows Vista Ultimate) and it was going at only 33 Megs a second. Does something seem wrong in my system? Would i benefit from an ATA-6 capable card? Can my current IDE controller on the mobo run ATA-6? How do i change it?
 
No, sorry. There will be no significant performance gains. I doubt you'd even notice the difference.
 
Well i did a test on the work PC and it hit about 120 Mb/sec on a Dell. I came home and tested my WD Caviars and both only hit 33 Mb/sec.
Work PC : Windows XP
Home PC: Windows Vista Ultimate
App used : HD Tach 3.0.1

Notes: On my Home PC with Windows Ultimate, i resized the HDD ( i was fiddling around with it) and installed Ubuntu, then realized i should use another machine for it and removed it and the Linux Parition. Ever since, its been running slow and sluggish. Should i reformatt and reinstall Windows Vista Ultimate?
 
What is the rest of the system? The interface speed is usually the least likely to be the culprit.
 
Sorry to keep you guys waiting. Please, dont give up on me. The 2 drives are both Western Digital Caviars 7200 RPM. One drive is 250Gigs, another one is 120 Gigs. I dont know the model number of them, but i dont remember them being this slow. Im using a GateWay GT4026E. Windows Vista installed, 2 gigs ram, Geforce 7600 GT OC'ed. The app i used is called HD Tach and it HAD to be run under compatibility mode for Vista, but not at work as it is Windows XP.

I decided to pop open the work PC today and it has a SATA connection where at home im running a IDE connection. Even then, it should be as slow as ATA33. Ive run various test on writing large files from one drive to another and they both transfer a max of 33.33 Mb/sec. But at work....they zoom by at 120-130 Mb/sec. Is it possible to change some options on the drives at home? Its making me upset seeing as both drives are capable of teh ATA-133 specs...yet its going as slow as possible.
 
Heres some info i pulled off of the Western Digital Website.

Transfer Rates
Buffer To Disk 602 Mbits/s (Max)

Buffer to Host (EIDE)
Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100 MB/s
Mode 4 Ultra ATA 66.6 MB/s
Mode 2 Ultra ATA 33.3 MB/s
Mode 4 PIO 16.6 MB/s
Mode 2 multi-word DMA 16.6 MB/s

Seems like mine is only running at Mode 2 Ultra ATA. When i say that transfers stay at 33.33 MB/sec they STAY there. No higher or lower than that.
 
There is only one for the southbridge and i installed that. Same thing. Is it possible that its a limitation of my mobo? It states im running at UltraDMA Mode 5. Its kind of a drag that my drives arent being used to thier full potential.
 
But at work....they zoom by at 120-130 Mb/sec. Is it possible to change some options on the drives at home? Its making me upset seeing as both drives are capable of teh ATA-133 specs...yet its going as slow as possible.
Click to expand...
Unless you are running some RAID array or an iRAM at work, I have to call shens. I do not know of any available harddrive that can sustain 120 MiB/s.

serialtoon said:
There is only one for the southbridge and i installed that. Same thing. Is it possible that its a limitation of my mobo? It states im running at UltraDMA Mode 5. Its kind of a drag that my drives arent being used to thier full potential.
Click to expand...
Mode 5 Ultra ATA 100 MB/s
Click to expand...

If you are running in UDMA mode 5, you should be seeing transfer rates that are greater than 33 MiB/s. I think a screenshot of your HDTach run could prove somewhat helpful in the context of this discussion.
 
Ok here are the pics i took from my Home PC. Looks better now that i updated the southbridge drivers and reinstalled windows.
-Secondary Drive 120GB WD Caviar EIDE
120WD.jpg


-Primary Drive 250GB WD Caviar EIDE
250WD.jpg


I want to take a picture of the work drive speeds, but im not there right now....im at home. But where it has that red bar, it states 130Mb/sec. It is SATA fyi.
 
serialtoon said:
Ok here are the pics i took from my Home PC. Looks better now that i updated the southbridge drivers and reinstalled windows.
-Secondary Drive 120GB WD Caviar EIDE
120WD.jpg


-Primary Drive 250GB WD Caviar EIDE
250WD.jpg


I want to take a picture of the work drive speeds, but im not there right now....im at home. But where it has that red bar, it states 130Mb/sec. It is SATA fyi.
Click to expand...

Those looks just fine, and the red bar at the bottom is "burst speed" basically a pointless number, that only will last for however much cache the drive has (usually 8 or 16mb these days) once that cache is empty the drive will show it's real speed. Sustained (average) is the important one. Also latency - access time (smaller - fewer ms, is better) matters.
 
Yup, those are normal numbers, and I too am calling "shens" on 120mb/s sustained with those drives
 
Again, that red bar is just burst speed.

The WD800JD has 8 MB cache, whereas the WD2500BB and WD1200BB you have in your other machine only has 2 MB of cache. That would explain why the burst speed on the WD800JD is higher. Hell, I have a Seagate and a Maxtor drive that both break 230 MB/s burst speed (16 MB of cache).

Your average read speed for the WD800JD is around 52.2 MB/s and the other two drives are in the mid to upper 40s, so it's not like they have drastically different performance in that respect.

So no, you're not breaking some insane barrier. The fastest single drive out there is the Maxtor Atlas (or is it the Fujitsu MAU?) SCSI drive and those hit like 90-100 MB/s sustained I think (and also spin at 15K RPM, twice as fast as those drives in your machines).
 
bashPenguin said:
Again, that red bar is just burst speed.

The WD800JD has 8 MB cache, whereas the WD2500BB and WD1200BB you have in your other machine only has 2 MB of cache. That would explain why the burst speed on the WD800JD is higher. Hell, I have a Seagate and a Maxtor drive that both break 230 MB/s burst speed (16 MB of cache).

Your average read speed for the WD800JD is around 52.2 MB/s and the other two drives are in the mid to upper 40s, so it's not like they have drastically different performance in that respect.

So no, you're not breaking some insane barrier. The fastest single drive out there is the Maxtor Atlas (or is it the Fujitsu MAU?) SCSI drive and those hit like 90-100 MB/s sustained I think (and also spin at 15K RPM, twice as fast as those drives in your machines).
Click to expand...
Calm down there tiger, thx for the information :) Thanks too all of you, especially the guy with the southbridge driver link. Without that i was hitting some really slow speeds on the test. Thanks again everyone!!
 
For comparison, here are the results that SR got on the WD2000BB
WB99 Disk/Read Transfer Rate - Begin 56.5 MB/sec
WB99 Disk/Read Transfer Rate - End 33.1 MB/sec
Click to expand...

looks in line with what you were able to achieve.

[pet peeve]
Sidenote: In WinXP (and Vista probably as well) ALT+PrtScn captures only the current window, which means that you won't have to crop the image. Charts such as HDTach graphs are smaller (filesize) and more legible when compressed in PNG or GIF format, rather than JPEG. The `paint' program that comes with Windows can save images to all of these formats. You can find an article explaing the differences and making recommendations w.r.t. when to use which format over here
[/pet peeve]
 
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