Achieving 3GB/s Performance

[cornellian]

Hello,

I currently have a motherboard which supports SATA 3GB/s hard drives and two hard drives which are SATA 3GB/s. When I installed Windows XP I stupidly allowed them to be installed as IDE drives instead of enabling AHCI and doing the F6 at the install. The drives work fine but the maximum speeds I am getting are a little bit better than SATA 1.5GB/s.

Do I have to have AHCI enabled (and subsequently reinstall Windows because all my hard drive controllers are on the motherboard and I don't believe the switching controller storage trick would work) or can I get the 3GB/s performance with having the hard drives in IDE legacy mode?

I am wondering if maybe my SATA cables (which came with the motherboard) are causing my slow performance.

I appreciate some advice.

Thanks,
Bill

 

[Chainzsaw]

Hi Bill,

First off that 3Gb (Gigabit, notice small b) is the AVAILABLE bandwidth for your hard drives. Your hard drives will NEVER reach that speed, unless you possibly have RAID 0 Raptors.

You don't necessarily require AHCI enables as all it does it allow NCQ (Native Command Queuing, which by the way was shown not to help much, if it all) and hot plug and play (which i doubt you will be doing often!).

Don't bother putting your hard drives in IDE legacy mode UNLESS YOU ARE HAVING PROBLEMS WITH YOU OS DETECTING YOUR SATA HARD DRIVES. So keep it as is

"I am wondering if maybe my SATA cables (which came with the motherboard) are causing my slow performance. "

Is your computer actually slow? Or are you saying that just because your actually not getting 3Gb/s it's going "slow"? Because your hard drives are actually operating normally as I stated above.

Hope this helps!

 

[mkaibear]

You'll never reach that bandwidth even if you have RAID 0 Raptors. That's 3Gb/s *per channel* on your SATA card, not 3GB/s total.

 

[cornellian]

I understand I will never reach the theoretical speed but I would like to achieve the full real world performance of my hard drives, if possible.

I used HD Tach to test the speed and I am currently getting about 170 MB/s burst speed with an average read of around 60 MB/s.

Do these numbers sound typical for a 250 GB Western Digital that is 3GB/s? I have looked online and I have found people who claim much higher burst speeds (in the high 200's) for a 3GB/s drive.

The drives are running fine and are detected properly. And my system isn't running slow, I meant slow as in the drives not being as fast as I thought they should be.

I shouldn't have said my drives are ran in "legacy" mode. In my motherboard I configured the drive detected to AUTO and they are being ran as a normal IDE drive. I tried playing around with the settings, changing it from AUTO, to IDE, to Enhance SATA, no difference in performance.

Let me know if the numbers above sound right to you.

Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it.

Bill

 

[cornellian]

My motherboard uses an Intel ICH7R chipset.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I used HD Tach to test the speed and I am currently getting about 170 MB/s burst speed with an average read of around 60 MB/s.

Do these numbers sound typical for a 250 GB Western Digital that is 3GB/s? I have looked online and I have found people who claim much higher burst speeds (in the high 200's) for a 3GB/s drive.

Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it.

Bill

If they are the WD2500KS, then that sounds correct. I have 4 of these drives running on a NForce4 Ultra chipset. HDTach reports the same speeds as yours. This also jibes with THG's Disk Chart. In fact, HDTach reports slightly higher than THG's chart.

 

[cornellian]

Yes, that is my model. Well it is reassuring to know that I am getting the expected performance from my drives. Thanks for the help.