Help! Slow SATA performance?

Am I getting the performance benefits of my SATA drives? CD rips are very slow (7-12x, vs 16-25x on other computers in the house). I did not install any special SATA or RAID drivers before I installed WinXP.

Integrated Peripherals BIOS settings for SATA are:

SATA RAID/AHCI Mode: Disabled
SATA PORT0-3 Native Mode: Enabled

If I'm only getting IDE performance from my SATA drives, what do I have to do to get SATA performance? (When I enable SATA RAID/AHCI Mode in the BIOS, Windows won't load.

Thanks, Jeff Steinberg

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6
Processor: Intel q6600
Ram: 2 gb A-Data ddr2-800
Video: BFG GEFORCE 7900 GS OC
HD 1: Western Digital Raptor 150
HD 2: Samsung HD501LJ
DVD/CD 1: TSSTcorp (Samsung) CD?DVDW SH-S183L
DVD/CD 2: TSSTcorp (Samsung) CD?DVDW SH-S203B
PSU: Antec TP3 650
Case: Powerspec (Coolermaster) ATX

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whether drives are on sata or pata isnt going to matter as far as performance goes, yet. no single sata hdd is even capable of exceeding 100MB/s, putting them well below sata150 specs, and even below pata100 specs, which has been out for years... sata is being used as a way of futureproofing essentially (aside from the added benefits, narrower cabling, hot swappable, lower power consumption via sata as opposed to 4 pin molex)

someone may have an answer to your cd ripping dilemma though.

------------------------------ Folding@Home
Reply to choirbass

It's hard to say what the problem is

try googling "HD tach" which is a program that let's you benchmark your hard drive's performance

Reply to turboflame

My understanding that to get the more modern performance enhancing function running you need to turn on AHCI function.

Message edited by martyjs on 09-21-2007 at 07:17:37 AM

------------------------------ First computer Tandy TRS80 (1979)

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity!"
Reply to martyjs

Here's a link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advan [...] _Interface

------------------------------ First computer Tandy TRS80 (1979)

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity!"
Reply to martyjs

I think if you enable it you will have to do a fresh install of Windows. To be sure google it there's stack of info available. Hope that helps.

------------------------------ First computer Tandy TRS80 (1979)

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity!"
Reply to martyjs

jeffsteinberg2 wrote :

Am I getting the performance benefits of my SATA drives? CD rips are very slow (7-12x, vs 16-25x on other computers in the house). I did not install any special SATA or RAID drivers before I installed WinXP.

Integrated Peripherals BIOS settings for SATA are:

SATA RAID/AHCI Mode: Disabled
SATA PORT0-3 Native Mode: Enabled

If I'm only getting IDE performance from my SATA drives, what do I have to do to get SATA performance? (When I enable SATA RAID/AHCI Mode in the BIOS, Windows won't load.

Thanks, Jeff Steinberg

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6
Processor: Intel q6600
Ram: 2 gb A-Data ddr2-800
Video: BFG GEFORCE 7900 GS OC
HD 1: Western Digital Raptor 150
HD 2: Samsung HD501LJ
DVD/CD 1: TSSTcorp (Samsung) CD?DVDW SH-S183L
DVD/CD 2: TSSTcorp (Samsung) CD?DVDW SH-S203B
PSU: Antec TP3 650
Case: Powerspec (Coolermaster) ATX

You have the exact problem I had five months ago. Don't worry I know of a way to get your AHCI drivers installed even after your OS install. If you have the JMicron controller then use it as a back door. (1) Configure bios for AHCI, then power down. (2) Put your SATA cable into the JMicron controller and boot off that, install your RAID/AHCI drivers. Then do the reverse, with some HDD it doesn't matter if your using IDE or AHCI mode. For me I have never seen a difference yet between the two.

Message edited by systemlord on 09-21-2007 at 08:34:26 AM

------------------------------ Intel C2D E6600 @ 3.2GHz * Asus P5E * 2x1 GB Crucial Ballistix Tracers * Raptor X * EVGA Geforce 8800GTX 768MB 651MHz/1525MHz/2100MHz * X-FI Fatal1ty Pro * Enermax Infiniti 720W PSU * Creative THX5.1 * Tuniq Tower 120
Silverstone TJ09 * Windows XP
Reply to systemlord

The CD ripping problems that you are having has nothing to do with your SATA running as IDE. Don't waste your time trying to setup AHCI. As Turboflame said get HDTach or HDTune, which I like better, and test your HDD. I'm assuming that your actually concerned about your CD drive on SATA and these programs won't test that. A good thing to check for is that your CD drives are set for DMA and not PIO. If these are indeed rips and not just copies you might check in task manager to see what your CPU usage is. It will also be very high if you are set to PIO even while copying, because the processor has to oversee the I/O.

Reply to Zorg

Found this on Experts Exchange. I had a similar problem, this fixed it. After the reboot your drive is scanned by Checkdsk, don't worry about this and let the scan finish (dont cancel it).

From the performance and CPU utilization numbers you posted, this is almost certainly a simple case of the drive being accessed via PIO instead of DMA.

Do the following:

Run REGEDIT. (Start - Run - Regedit)

Go to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

For each of the subkeys 0000, 0001, 0002, 0003, etc. delete (if present) the MasterIdDataChecksum and SlaveIdDataChecksum values.

Reboot.

That will most likely fix your issue. If not, go into Device Manager and expand the IDE/ATAPI controllers. For each channel (Primary & Secondary -- there may be more than one of each) -- do a right-click, Properties, and look on the Advanced tab. Be sure the selected transfer mode is "DMA if available". If all is working correctly, they should all be set to this -- and the "Current Transfer Mode" should be UDMA-x (x is a number that depends on whether or not you're looking at an optical drive or a hard drive).

If you made any changes in Device Manager above, repeat the RegEdit modification and reboot.

Reply to markbom

Why respond to a post from October when its almost Jan 1 2008? :pfff: Your beating a dead horse.

------------------------------ Intel C2D E6600 @ 3.2GHz * Asus P5E * 2x1 GB Crucial Ballistix Tracers * Raptor X * EVGA Geforce 8800GTX 768MB 651MHz/1525MHz/2100MHz * X-FI Fatal1ty Pro * Enermax Infiniti 720W PSU * Creative THX5.1 * Tuniq Tower 120
Silverstone TJ09 * Windows XP
Reply to systemlord

It might help others who come across this problem and are googling for info.

Reply to markbom

markbom,

Thanks for beating my dead horse back to life - your suggestion to delete those registry keys freed my hard drive from PIO mode (~13MB/s sequential read&write). Now I'm seeing 66.82MB/s read & 42MB/s Write.

Thanks for responding to that post from back in October! (now almost a year ago)

Reply to Anonymous

You're welcome, glad to be of help!

Reply to markbom

It was nice of markbom to post his solution here, even though it came some time after the question was asked.

The info he provided not only helped the person who originally posted the thread, but it helped me, too (on 01/19/09 no less) - and it's probably helped a lot of others out here as well, I suspect.

I'm always grateful for all thoseincorrigible dead horse beaters out there.

Reply to cyberscribe_50

I've just found this post after fixing a similar problem (I had searched unsuccessfully for answers to this a few months back).

My symptoms were similar: but Device Manager was displaying two Primary and two Secondary IDE controllers. Following up on comments in a discussion of this issue (which is apparently normal for some motherboards) I found the victim complaining that one of them appeared to be stuck in PIO mode. The recommendation made was to uninstall all the IDE controllers, starting with the 'stuck' one, then simply reboot and let Windows reinstall the drivers automatically. So I did, and now my SATA drive is working perfectly!

Reply to Anonymous

I had a similar problem with ICH10R. None of the solutions provided helped me but I was able to resolve it.

My Symptom:
Fair burst speeds, but then slowed to a c-r-a-w-l after ~ 250MB :pfff: . Windows wouldn't recognize the array when bios set to RAID, but would when set to AHCI. I had to create the array within the bios, with bios set to RAID, and then switch it back to AHCI for Windows to recognize it. The Intel Matrix Storage Console 8.5 & 8.8 didn't recognize the array, but would recognize the individual volumes.

My Observation:
The Gigabyte CD provided an incomplete and incorrect driver package for Win2K3 (32). The intel inf update included infs for ICH9 and below, and no recognizable drivers for either RAID or AHCI (just drivers for the secondary on-board JRaid). Turned out, I was operating under a stock windows AHCI driver.

My Resolution:
After I downloaded and installed the correct driver set, all was well again: Look for motherboard_driver_sataraid_intel_bootdisk_32, or url here as of this writing: http://downloads.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=559073

In my case, I uninstalled the device from Device Manager, and then installed the drivers. Rebooted, switched to RAID mode, and booted into Windows. The Intel Raid Manager immediately did what it should, and my disk speeds were at a place where I could begin performance tests. I suppose it would probably have worked if I left it AHCI, not sure, but in my case the hot swap seemed to work just fine anyway. Write speeds with write cache enabled avg 52MB/s, with read avg of 160 MB/s and 330 MB/s bursts.

Monte

Mobo: GIGAbyte mobo EP45C-UD3R
CPU: Intel E8400
Disks: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000333AS 1TB
Stripe: RAID5 64K 4+1spare
RAM: Mushkin 4GB DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
Case: iStarUSA D-406-B6SA-Silver Steel 4U Rackmount
Cooler: Rosewill Z (RCX-X775-EX)

Reply to MonteHansen

i would never recommend using the drivers supplied with a motherboard, always use the latest ones from the manufacturer's website.

Reply to MikhailCompo

Markbom you are the bomb! The advice in your post (the regedit part) totally restored my sata drive speeds back to normal. Thanks a bunch for your supposedly out-of-date post.

Reply to coolvoodoo

I wanted to let everyone know of a way to fix the sata dvd drive slow install problem.
Reboot your desktop and enter the bios. Usually the delete key at the first screen.
Check advanced settings, if not there look for this setting name in each bios window as it can cause a problem.
Look for IDE HDD Block Mode, disable it and reboot.
Believe it or not, this is causing some machines to try and read blocks off of an install disk like it is a hard drive disk.
As soon as I did that my lg started working like a champ.

Reply to Anonymous

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