With all the variables, why are you so strong in beleif it must be a mobo issue?
=>because I have already checked all variables you refer.
Is the ATA MODEL serveral months older than SATA, or did you just buy the SATA later?
=>The ATA is slightly older, I bought The 400 Gb around 100 euros, and several months maybe one year later (?) I bought the 750 Gb in the same price
What are the model numbers? Did you check their stats on THG's HD charts?
=>model numbers: ST3 750 330 AS : the SATA 750 Gb
ST3 400 620 A : The ATA 400 Gb
Checking the charts one can see a difference of 10-20 % among these drives which does not justify the huge difference of 12 seconds versus 26 seconds
What are Seagate's perfromance stats for the two drives? Which is the problem, - is the SATA drive operating slower than stats or is the ATA just a particularly fast drive?
Performance with HDTach:
400Gb Random access 15.9 ms, average read 64.7 mb/s, burst speed 93.3 mb/s
750 GB Random access 12.6 ms, average read 87.1 mb/s, burst speed 247.6 mb/s
Have you run Seagates tool on the SATA to confirm it has no problems?
a check for Long Drive Self Test with SeaTools showed no problems, there was no need to do this anyway because I use this drive for 10 months and showed no corrupted data , strange noises, read errors, or SMART reports. The drive is ok.
Are there any differences in BIOS settings - boot order, splash scrren, hard disk priority, password check, speed step, thermal monitoring. SATA/AHCI mode, etc. - that can affect boot time?
No there is no difference in all cases I cared to keep all parameters of the system constant. Boot order was the same but anyway it does not play a role because the delay is while loading windows, in the blue bar indicator screen.
In all cases I use legacy IDE, and the least I expect from a SATA drive is to load as fast as an ATA when in Legacy IDE mode. However it does not.
What other software is loaded on SATA drive that loads with operating system? Have you compared the processes running on each machine after the boot is complete (from Device Manager)? What are the differences?
I have antivirus in the SATA and the Gigabyte utilities at startup. But I believe that the impact of the former is mostly when logging in to the desktop and not in the introductory screen with the <<blue bar>>. Or at least the difference is such that in no case loading of 2-3 services would add 14 seconds of extra boot time !
Moreover XP in SATA never booted as fast as ATA even in a fresh installation.
Have you checked for viruses with several types of virus checker to make sure SATA is clean?
=>Is clean however I have checked only with AVG.
Are both versions of OS licensed and registered?
=> A cracked version of windows does not affect boot time in any case as I have seen in several examples.
But even if we assume that a cracked copy made a SATA slower…why it does not make ATA slower as well?
For the record I own a legal copy of windows as a former student of National Technical University of Athens (University has bought hundreds of Windows licenses and all students may obtain one for free – lucky me)
It would seem very strange to me that Gigabyte would not provide a good driver for the type of drive that everyone is using today - which seems to be your assumption. I have a Gigabyte board with SATA drive that works fine. With all the variables, why are you so strong in beleif it must be a mobo issue? I have not heard others report a similar problem or issues with slow SATA - and there are a ton of experienced people using Gigabyte boards with SATA.
I work as a software engineer and driver-software issues is not a so strange thing to me, as I am facing often cases where customers find defects that our system test did not catch. Among these problems, a lot of reported problems include performance enhancements, which resemble to this case.
When the hard disk is robust and works ok then I can assume nothing else than a driver which may work ok and many experienced people find no problems
but it is not optimized. One example could be the infamous older versions of ATI drivers which were not fully optimized (Current versions are excellent though).
Another example is from Intel, the giant, who provided the first version of Pentium with a defect in the floating point unit in 1993.
A more recent example is the extreme delays of copying and deleting which presented Vista, from a corporation that is also a giant and worldwide respected.
I just want to say that defects/malfunctions can happen everywhere. It is a law.
But the reason I am discussing it here is because I just make an assumption as you correctly say. That is why I have not sent an email to Gigabyte for this.
I would like to ask other opinions of people who may know this matter better than me and find the answer to this problem.
Software is the root of many evils I think. Let’s see an example that made me laugh: I performed a copy of 1 gigabyte in all cases and timed the transfer:
TEST1 = copy 1 Gb from External USB drive to Desktop
TEST2 = copy 1 Gb from Desktop to Desktop
400Gb:
TEST1: 42 seconds
TEST2: 14 seconds
750Gb Windows XP pro
TEST1: 52 seconds (slower than the ATA ?)
TEST2: 10 seconds
750Gb Windows Vista with SP1 and all updates
TEST1: 44 seconds
TEST2: 30 seconds (three times slower that XP !!!)
If anyone has a SATA I would appreciate to time the screen where windows is loading with the blue bar (and only this section!) and post the result here.
Furthermore if it has a timing of less than 15 seconds , is it in AHCI or in Legacy IDE mode?
I miss the old times, when for example 20 years ago, i bought my Seagate drive 20 Megabytes and the only thing I had to do is to open the case of my 10 MHz 8088, plug in the controller in the 8-bit ISA bus and do a format c: /s sigh….
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