Is my Hard Drive Running in SATA2??

[Witt78]

My new system just arrived. I constructed the PC and installed / configured Windows Vista Home Premium.

Now I'm doing benchmards and such...

HD Tune states the following.

Drive Standard : ATA/ATAPI-8 - SATA II
Suported : UDMA Mode 6 - (Ultra ATA/133)
Active : UDMA Mode 5 - (Ultra ATA/100)

-------------------------

This thing is running as if it were an IDE drive?? I think there was a setting in my bios that treated SATA Drives "As IDE"... I can change it to RAID or AHCI.

That's not right is it?

Not confident I know what I'm doing with this. I've never used SATA before... Please advise...

- Witt

 

[jeb1517]

Your mobo offers to handle the real SATA II HDD in one of three ways. It can make it appear to the OS as if it were an IDE drive, which means among other things you will not have to worry about providing SATA drivers for the OS to use the drive. That is what you have done already, and it works. This does NOT mean that you have lost any SATA II performance. The other choices are to use the AHCI option, which would require some adjustment to load the appropriate drivers, as SomeJoe7777 says, or to use your drive as part of a RAID array, which it seems you don't want (and I agree you don't need RAID!)

Bottom line is, you are already getting most of what SATA II offers, with a few possible exceptions. (SomeJoe7777 may be able to clarify that part.) So probably you do not need to change anything.

Quoted from another thread but I think it applies here also. Your OS thinks its an IDE drive but data transfer is at SATA II speeds I believe.

 

[skittle]

Note: HDD transfer rates will not get anywhere close to SATA150 or SATA300 peak speeds.

AHCI only enables a couple of mostly useless features. Probably best to keep it in IDE mode.

 

[Witt78]

Note: HDD transfer rates will not get anywhere close to SATA150 or SATA300 peak speeds.

AHCI only enables a couple of mostly useless features. Probably best to keep it in IDE mode.

What is considered a good transfer rate for an SATA2 drive?

I am using a Western Digital Caviar... 640Gb @ 7200RPM. SATA2/3.0 Gb per Second.

Just give me a "Ball Park" figure...

Acording to my HD Tune 2.55 bench test, I am seeing....

Lowest ==> 49.1 meg/sec

Highest ==> 111.0 meg/sec

Average ==> 88.8 Meg/sec

Burst ==> 137.5 Meg/sec

Access Time ==> 12.1ms

Please advise...

- Witt

 

[skittle]

I dont know exact figures off hand, google does though.

But those numbers sound very very good. My old seagate averages around 55mbs.

 

[50bmg]

I just installed a Seagate 500G SATA II. I had my SATA 1.5G for 4 years. So i am a little rusty with HD setup.

How do i know that i am getting the most out of my drive? The bios of my Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4 sees it as a IDE. I am not really sure if i have it set up correctly.

 

[rozar]

Please read here for more definition of "SATA 2"

http://www.serialata.org/6gbnamingguidelines.asp

 

[Paperdoc]

To Witt78 et al: those speeds look very good to me. I have'nt looked closely recently, but I recall AVERAGE throughput on a SATA II drive in the range 35 to 80MB/s (that's bytes, not bits) over a long multi-file transfer task. Peak is much faster, but happens only for short poriods.

 

[ausch30]

What is considered a good transfer rate for an SATA2 drive?

I am using a Western Digital Caviar... 640Gb @ 7200RPM. SATA2/3.0 Gb per Second.

Just give me a "Ball Park" figure...

Acording to my HD Tune 2.55 bench test, I am seeing....

Lowest ==> 49.1 meg/sec

Highest ==> 111.0 meg/sec

Average ==> 88.8 Meg/sec

Burst ==> 137.5 Meg/sec

Access Time ==> 12.1ms

Please advise...

- Witt

Just to give you something to reference it against I just ran HD Tune with my Seagate 7200.11 500gb and I got
Min-51.2
Max-106
Avg-84.7
Access-12.3
Burst-196.5
CPU usage-2.0

 

[Witt78]

Please read here for more definition of "SATA 2"

http://www.serialata.org/6gbnamingguidelines.asp

Just to give you something to reference it against I just ran HD Tune with my Seagate 7200.11 500gb and I got
Min-51.2
Max-106
Avg-84.7
Access-12.3
Burst-196.5
CPU usage-2.0

Priceless information guys... You guys are a huge help on a daily basis! I always get good info to re-learn what I have fallen behind on. (I have not built a computer in 8 or 10 years.) (The last PC I built was a Pentium 3 @ 500Mhz. )

If it wasn't for you guys, I don't know if I could ever "Un-Noob" myself!

- Witt

 

[Witt78]

I just installed a Seagate 500G SATA II. I had my SATA 1.5G for 4 years. So i am a little rusty with HD setup.

How do i know that i am getting the most out of my drive? The bios of my Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4 sees it as a IDE. I am not really sure if i have it set up correctly.

HD Tune states the following.

Drive Standard : ATA/ATAPI-8 - SATA IIhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
Suported : UDMA Mode 6 - (Ultra ATA/133)
Active : UDMA Mode 5 - (Ultra ATA/100)

-------------------------

This thing is running as if it were an IDE drive?? I think there was a setting in my bios that treated SATA Drives "As IDE"... I can change it to RAID or AHCI.

That's not right is it?

Read both the quotes above... It sounds to me like your drive should be fine. To make sure... Download "HD Tune" (Just Google it) and run a benchmark test on your hard drive. Then compare your results with the numbers talked about in this forum thread.

If your numbers are anywhere close to ours, you should be set up correctly.

- Witt

PS - HD Tune will give you drive performance that looks like this...

Just to give you something to reference it against I just ran HD Tune with my Seagate 7200.11 500gb and I got
Min-51.2
Max-106
Avg-84.7
Access-12.3
Burst-196.5
CPU usage-2.0

 

[50bmg]

right on.

I ran HDTune. I didnt record the results, but i remember a few.
Avg - 82
access - 12.7
Burst - 197
CPU usage - 1.9

 

[RetiredChief]

Just downloaded an ran HD Tune on Raid0 Added - HD = 2 x Seagate 320 G 7200.10) 2nd edit, Added 2nd raid0 setup (Samsung SP2504C) Same computer.
Seagate Samsung
Min - 70.1 MB/S ------------ 73.3 MB/s
Max - 147.2 MB/S --------- 109.3 Mb/s
Avg - 117.8 MB/S --------- 93.2 Mb/s

Access Time - 12.9 mS ---- 14.3 mS
Burst - 152 MB/S ----------- 103.6 Mb/s
CPU Usage 3.4% ---------- 4.3 %

 

[50bmg]

i just ran HDTune on my 250G sata 150 and compare to my sataII above.

avg - 55
access - 15.8
cpu usage - 7.1

Wow, the sataII is ~33% faster. Evan with the bios seeing it as an IDE.

I need to learn about Raid. I had no luck running it as Raid in my bios.

 

[Crashman]

What is considered a good transfer rate for an SATA2 drive?
....

Burst ==> 137.5 Meg/sec

- Witt

Looks good to me.

 

[jeb1517]

I have a WD 250 SATA II running in IDE mode also.

minimum: 19.2
max: 58.7
average: 50.3
burst: 134.3

My average seems to be much lower than above results. I have a GA-MA78GM mobo

Edit: I just read the SATA article. My WD is rated as SATA 3.0 gb/s

 

[ausch30]

I have a WD 250 SATA II running in IDE mode also.

minimum: 19.2
max: 58.7
average: 50.3
burst: 134.3

My average seems to be much lower than above results. I have a GA-MA78GM mobo

Edit: I just read the SATA article. My WD is rated as SATA 3.0 gb/s

You probably have an older drive. Even a drive from last generation is much slower than current drives.

With my Seagate ES which is the Enterprise version of the 7200.10 with first generation perpendicular recording I get
Min - 38.4
Max - 79.2
Avg - 64.5
Access - 12.9
Burst - 178.3
CPU usage - 1.8
which as you can see is quite a bit slower than my newer 7200.11

 

[jeb1517]

You probably have an older drive. Even a drive from last generation is much slower than current drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822144701

That's the exact drive that I have.

 

[ausch30]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822144701

That's the exact drive that I have.

That drive is a few years old and in the last few years there have been some significant changes in hard drive tech such as perpendicular recording which allow for much higher densities and much faster speeds so I'm sure it was a great drive in the day but that's the way this industry is.

 

[Chestert]

The bottom line to all of this is that TODAY, SATA is just a marketing pipedream, in terms of any performance increase we are going to see with TODAY'S motherboards! It is wonderful that the SATA organazation can quote transfer rates of 3 GB/s or 6GB/s, but this is totally useless to us until mother board mfgrs come up with a data buss that will handle these speeds.
So the TRUTH is that with SATA drives, you gain better air-flow inside your PC case with the serial cables as compared to the use of 18-wire wide IDE cables. You gain NO transfer rate increas yet TODAY!

It's taken me about four weeks to finally realize this!

Chester

 

[Witt78]

Ouch, what the hell happened here?

This just a fluke?

- Witt

EDIT Below

I guess it was a fluke... Just ran another bench and this one looks a lot better than the previous...

 

[cjl]

Is it repeatable?

 

[RetiredChief]

Refer: Witt78
That first pass was not really a fluke. What happens is that a program was accessing the HDD in the background. Getting an accurate reading und vista is a hit or miss unless you disable all programs that might acess your HHD in the background. Have vista installed on Samsung HDD's (see my previous post), unded up running the samsung test from XP (On seagate drives.)