How do I test my hard drive speed/throughput??

[little_scrapper]

How do I test abrand new 160GB WD16000AAJS?PCMark05 my XP startup score was like 8MB/s and my general harddisk usage score was like 5MB/s.

I have a DS3 and in bios: INTEGRATED PERIPHERALS the settings are.

SATA AHCI Mode = disabled
SATA Port 0-3 Native Mode = Enabled
Onboard SATA/IDE Device = Enabled
Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode = IDE

The three choices for that last one are IDE, AHCI, and RAID/IDE.

IDE = SATA posts work as IDE mode.
AHCI = SATA posts work as AHCI mode.
RAID/IDE = SATA posts work as RAID Mode and IDE ports work as IDE mode.


I do not do raid. throughput ok or should it be higher in PCMark05??

 

[31computers]

Have you tried HDTach free download?

 

[rwpritchett]

HDTach, as mentioned above is good. So is HD Tune... both are free.

BTW, I would suggest having the drive set as AHCI to enable some features such as native command queing. Compare benchmarks with the programs mentioned and stick with whatever gives you the best performance.

 

[LVDAX]

Thanks for these guys... I had been using an outdated program (wont mention so no one dl's it). Thanks again...

 

[little_scrapper]

HDTach, as mentioned above is good. So is HD Tune... both are free.

BTW, I would suggest having the drive set as AHCI to enable some features such as native command queing. Compare benchmarks with the programs mentioned and stick with whatever gives you the best performance.

But I dont thinkl I can just change it once it was loaded the other way. I have been reading that if you change it after the OS is loaded you get the BSOD.

Any way to switch over without having issues to worry about?

 

[little_scrapper]

HD tach seems to work.

Says I get 195.5MB/s on burst and avg read is 67.8MB/s.

Is that any good for single drive?? WD1600AAJS

 

[31computers]

That is VERY good. I am using 2 x SATA 300 drives(not Raid) together with 1 x IDE drive and score 116 on Burst, and 49 on Average read :?

Does anyone know whats wrong?

 

[rwpritchett]

But I dont thinkl I can just change it once it was loaded the other way. I have been reading that if you change it after the OS is loaded you get the BSOD.

Any way to switch over without having issues to worry about?

You are correct, if you just change the BIOS to AHCI and try to boot, you will get a BSOD because Windows will be unable to find the driver to run AHCI and therefore cannot boot. There are two ways to get around this.

#1 Reinstall Windows with the BIOS on AHCI and be sure to F6 the drivers. Alternatively, you can try to do a repair installation. Obviously this is very time consuming.

#2 Install the AHCI drivers in Windows, reboot, then change the BIOS to AHCI. I'll just quote a thread from the Asus forum that gives a good description of how this is done:

I just want to report that after some reading around the net i have succeed to "convert" standard IDE mode to AHCi within installed windows XP; and it isn't difficult at all

We have intels AHCi drivers on MB cd

-> \Drivers\Chipset\Intel\makedisk\DOS\F632\

Go to device manager, expand IDE ATA controllers and right click on the IDE controller (I don't recall the real name since I'm in AHCi mode now)

Select update drivers -> advanced -> don't search I will choose … -> have disk -> and browse to the above mentioned folder with AHCI drivers (select iaahci.inf) . From the list select Intel ICH8R /do … driver.

After the update windows will suggest to restart your computer. Do so, and when booting go to the bios and enable AHCI mode; save setting and load windows.

Windows will now find new hardware and install it. After this is done just install the latest intel matrix storage manager and that's it.

It went smoothly for me without any problem. Hope it helps a bit.

You're probably fine leaving it the way it is. I just thought you'd like to know in case you feel like changing it. BTW, my HDTach score for my Seagate 7200.10 320GB drive is 233.7MB/s burst and 61.5MB/s average with AHCI, so your numbers are pretty good.

 

[little_scrapper]

In your quote it says to install the latest Intel Matrix Storage Mangaer. What is that? Where do I get it?

 

[rwpritchett]

First of all, these instructions were written specifically for a P965 chipset board, but the principal is the same for whatever chipset you have. That being the case, what motherboard do you have? This will determine what drivers you need.

 

[little_scrapper]

DS3

 

[rwpritchett]

You can get the Intel drivers from the Intel website. They bundle AHCI and RAID together, eventhough your board does not support RAID on the Intel controller.

Actually, there's an easier way to go about this. Doesn't the DS3 have additional SATA controllers? I think there's a Gigabyte one? Anyway, what you can try is to have your SATA hard drive plugged into a controller set to IDE mode while you convert a different controller to AHCI. After you've succesfully installed the AHCI controller, plug your hard drive into that controller and boot up.

For example, plug your hard drive into the Intel ICH8 controller setup as IDE with the Gigabyte controller set to AHCI. Boot to Windows, install the Gigabyte AHCI drivers from disc or downloaded file. Turn off the computer and then connect the hard drive to the Gigabyte controller and bootup. Should work.