Writing speed on SATA II's

[zehpavora]

Hello.

I've been having the problem to see files being copied from one hard-drive to another (physical hard-drives) with a sped of 15mb/s.

They are a Western Digital WDC WD6401AALS-00L3B2 as system, a Seagate ST3250620AS as documents, and another Western Digital, a WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1 as files. They are 640GB, 250GB, and 1TB respectively.

They're mounted on a P6T Deluxe V2, with a i7 920 @ 3.00 GHz, Cooler Master V8, EVGA GeForce GTX 275 Superclocked SLI, 6GB OCZ OCZ3X1333LV2G at 1334 MHz CAS 7-7-7-20 (XMP 2 on BIOS), BIOS V. 0302.


Every software and Driver are updated to the last known version on Asus support site but Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver V8.9.0.1023 because it says the hardware is not supported (and BIOS. I don't plan to mess with that...).


(I live in Brasil, so don't tell me to change any hardware as they are incredibly expensive compared to the US.)


Any help would be appreciated.


Thank you.

 

[LAMINI]

thats slow for internal SATAII drives... considering that even my EXTERNAL USB 7200rpm seagate/western digital drives do continious high 20mb/s (starts at 30mb/s).

are these results from hdtach? all i can say is ensure youre running with enough power (power supply). other than that, put the bios back to defaults and do what you have to to get sata items working. youre running sataII internals, and as mentioned, 15mb/s is horrible. any unneccesary services running? make sure all that antivirus/torrents stuff is off too. enable only what you need to get goin + drivers and see how that goes. is this on xp W7 vista? try it on W7 and see how it goes unless youre already on it, no drivers required. good luck

 

[zehpavora]

I forgot to tell that, sorry.

I have a Corsair TX850w, so power is not an issue.

The speed comes from Windows 7 64-bit copying a 45 MB RMVB video file (anime) from my documents hard drive, the Seagate, to the Files Hard-drive, the terabyte one. Even so, this kind of speed is normal on the other drive, too.

The funny thing is that this only happens with Windows, because games are not lagging at all.


[strike]Going to try the hdtach program now. Gonna this edit later to post results.[/strike]

HDTach does not work on Windows 7. Do you guys know any other good HD benchmark program?


Thank you.

 

[Pointertovoid]

HD benchmark : IOMeter (more difficult to use), CrystalDiskMark, Atto.
Others only give contiguous read, which is less useful.
But 15MB/s in a real case isn't very bad. It's a bit low. For 150kB files, about 25MB/s would be better.

"Hardware not supported": could it be that you didn't enable Ahci in the Bios?

Expensive: buy at eBay.com or eBay.de - but before making an offer, make sure the seller wants to ship to Brazil. Greetings to South America!

 

[zehpavora]

Pointerovoid,

If I enable AHCI, the system won't even boot to Windows.

I'll try the programs, but it seems that after doing some tweaks, such as activating Disable Bit on my i7 made the driver a bit faster towards the 45mb video files...

[strike]I'll try the programs, as I said, and post the results later.[/strike]
How can I post IOMeter's results?


Thank you very much for the reply and the eBay idea.
Greetings to you, too.


Thank you.

 

[sub mesa]

Enabling XD/NX cpu feature will not affect your I/O speeds, if you thought so that has to be a testing quirk and you should re-test your findings.

Generally, the harddrive has maximum speeds (~100MB/s) but these are only reached in perfect conditions. For a real disk that is in use and may be fragmented or have files placed at the middle/end of the capacity on the drive, will be slower than their maximum performance. Though 15MB/s is a tad slow i must agree.

 

[zehpavora]

I've been of Google to know how to use IOMeter, and the results are that every HD performs with a 65mb read/write speed.

I guess that the files must be "bottlenecking" my I/O operations in some way, because there are no useful explanations...


I'll find another way to see that and test my hypothesis but with no guarantees.



Thank you.

 

[sub mesa]

Try this test:

Download HDTune Pro (not the standard one) evaluation, and run the Files benchmark. This will test actual filesystem performance and not "raw" performance. If this shows a much lower value, fragmentation or other filesystem issues may be the cause. If not, its something else.

 

[zehpavora]

sub mesa,

The Seagate drive got more than 65mb in writing and the terabyte drive got up to 100mbs on writing, too.

It seems that my hypothesis was right, then. The file must be very slow OR windows is making fun of me.


I'll run bigger tests and see if the result is sustained.



Thank you.

 

[sminlal]

If the heads are having to move around a lot during the copy then it could easily account for the low transfer rates. Such a problem could be caused by:

1) Concurrent activity from another program accessing the source drive or the target drive. Run task manager, add I/O counts to the list of processes, and watch to see if any other processes than your copy are doing I/Os. Make sure you're viewing processes from all accounts.

2) Fragmentation. Try defragmenting both the source and target drives and then do the copy again to see if the speeds improve.

 

[zehpavora]

The only fragmented disk I ahve is the system one, because the anti-virus does not let me defragment its files.

All drivers are OK based on the data of the different programs I have here.


I don't know what is happening, and it seems it'll stay like this.


The funny part, I forgot to tell you, is that yesterday I watched other videos with 45mb on RMVB and they seemed to have been copied WAY faster, at the speed it should be going since the beginning.

However, I couldn't see the speed, because it was faster than the Windows explorer window...


Maybe I had to "unlock" it speeds?


Thank you.

 

[sub mesa]

Anti-virus may be responsible for your slow speeds; as this slows down ALL I/O. That's why i never ran any anti virus software during my lifetime. Besides the virusses that are known are much likely less destructive than those who aren't known to virus scanners.

 

[zehpavora]

Maybe, I'm not inclined to that answer. My anti-virus only runs Sunday, and I don't use the computer when it is running.

The anti-virus is on the system disk, which was not part of the problem here.

I'm glad, though. Now I've found good benchmarking programs....


Thank you all.

 

[sub mesa]

Anti-virus consists of two parts: an on-demand scanner which is activate always, and a scheduled check that can be disabled or postponed. But the on-demand scanner is often activate always and will scan any files programs will try to access. This would significantly slow down the whole system though, which is the reason i do not run anti virus software.

It doesn't matter where your anti-virus software is installed to. As it would check all I/O. If you had a floppy disk it would slow down the floppy disk as well because it wants to check the files on there before your application can get a chance to see them.

You could try rebooting into safe mode and retry your copy speed test.