SATA Drive is DAM slow, how to fix it

[chandra]

I am using

Asus sli delux
1GB ram
120GB SATA segate
MSI 6600GT pcie

My SATA Drive is dam slow,i am getting iritated of its performance.

any recommendation or solution on how to make SATA drive fast.


Regards

 

[Mark A]

I am using

Asus sli delux
1GB ram
120GB SATA segate
MSI 6600GT pcie

My SATA Drive is dam slow,i am getting iritated of its performance.

any recommendation or solution on how to make SATA drive fast.


Regards

Go to Windows device manager and find out what speed your drive controller
is set at. Check the transfer mode and make sure it is set at Serial ATA 1
Generation - 1.5GB. This should be selected automatically, but if it is not
you have some kind of problem.

 

[Geoff]

Speaking of slow, etc., when will solid state drives come to the masses?

-g

 

[Bob Willard]

I am using

Asus sli delux
1GB ram
120GB SATA segate
MSI 6600GT pcie

My SATA Drive is dam slow,i am getting iritated of its performance.

any recommendation or solution on how to make SATA drive fast.


Regards

For starters, you should quantify your HD's STR with a bit more
specificity than "damn slow". Download HDtach, either v3.x if you
have NT/W2K/XP or v2.x if you have W9x, then run it as close to
standalone as you can get under your OS. Then, compare HDtach's
reported data with Seagate's specs for that HD, and see if they
kinda match.

 

[Stevie Boy]

Speaking of slow, etc., when will solid state drives come to the masses?

-g

There already here in the form of USB pens,CF cards,SD cards and Memory
sticks. However looks like years before one will get a solid state device
big enough to internally fit in a pc using ATA or SATA type controller
interfaces. Memory is just to expensive for the size of drives available
these days. Maybe some very small GB drives will appear soon but thats all
surmising.

Steve

 

[Alex Devlin]

Go to Windows device manager and find out what speed your drive
controller is set at. Check the transfer mode and make sure it is set
at Serial ATA 1 Generation - 1.5GB. This should be selected
automatically, but if it is not you have some kind of problem.

Where is this exactly?
I can't find anything like it on mine.

 

[Chandra]

i checked, it is set to 1.5GB

especially i have a download folder, when i read that folder it will
take at least 5-10 min some time.
dont know how to trouble shoot.

 

[Chandra]

Hi

i did benching mark with the HDtach

Mine i got
Burst Speed 133.4 MB/s
Random Access 12.4 ms
CPU Utilization 5% [+/- 2%]
Average Read 47.7 MB/s

Comparing bench mark with Segate Barracuda

Burst Speed 98.5 MB/s
Random Access 12.5 ms
CPU Utilization 2% [+/- 2%]
Average Read 46.2 MB/s

Like to have any comments Bob.

 

[Stevie Boy]

i did benching mark with the HDtach

Mine i got
Burst Speed 133.4 MB/s
Random Access 12.4 ms
CPU Utilization 5% [+/- 2%]
Average Read 47.7 MB/s

Comparing bench mark with Segate Barracuda

Burst Speed 98.5 MB/s
Random Access 12.5 ms
CPU Utilization 2% [+/- 2%]
Average Read 46.2 MB/s

Just looking at those results it looks far from slow and better than the
Seagate. Just because it's a SATA doesn't mean it's gonna be rocket fuel.
The extra bandwidth (150MB/s) isn't going to make a whole huge difference
because the reading of the discs and transfering the info to the SATA
controllers is letting it down and unlikely to be any faster than an EIDE
drive.

Steve

 

[Mark A]

Just looking at those results it looks far from slow and better than the
Seagate. Just because it's a SATA doesn't mean it's gonna be rocket fuel.
The extra bandwidth (150MB/s) isn't going to make a whole huge difference
because the reading of the discs and transfering the info to the SATA
controllers is letting it down and unlikely to be any faster than an EIDE
drive.

Steve

That's correct. Most desktop 7200 RPM SATA drives are limited by the
physical drive technology. Not really much faster than the best IDE drives
for most applications.

 

[Leif Nordmand Andersen]

Hi Chandra,

I am using

Asus sli delux
1GB ram
120GB SATA segate
MSI 6600GT pcie

My SATA Drive is dam slow,i am getting iritated of its performance.

any recommendation or solution on how to make SATA drive fast.

I've read the other posters replies.

I asume the motherboard is the ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe.

I've just troubleshooted SATA drive problems on my own board ...
Unfortunately I didn't find any answers how to correct it, but I found
a work around.

I had two drives one Maxtor 160 GB SATA Drive (my system drive) and
one 250 GB SATA Seagate drive connected an experienced that they were
much slower than could be expected. With extensive disk use, they
would actually freeze, but it didn't happen too often, so I lived with
it.

I got this board because it has 8 SATA ports, I needed to connect 6 x
250 GB drives as a soft raid 5 (a windows soft raid NOT the inbuild
raid) - they were all Seagate 250 GB drives.

But the inbuild SIL3114 won't work as a simple SATA controller, so I
had to get a Promise SATA II 150 TX4 4 SATA port controller. I then
connected 4 of the Seagate 250 GB drives of the 6 drive raid to this
controller. And the 2 other of the 6 drive raid to the NVidia
controller, which will work as a simple SATA controller.

This was slow, this crashed and trashed my drives all the time.

I have now disabled BOTH the onboard Sil3114 and the onboard NVidia
SATA controllers and connect two Promise SATA II 150 TX4 4 sata port
controllers.

For 60 Hours now ... Not a single BSOD or breakdown (before it would
run max 2 hours IF I DIDN'T TOUCH THE COMPUTER, much less if I used
it!!). Not only that - it's considerable much faster

I don't know if the onboard controllers are bad, if they are not
compatible with the drive I have - or what.

If possible, try to disable the onboard SATA controllers and use an
external one - it will give you some idea, if it works for you.

regards Leif.

 

[Mark A]

I've read the other posters replies.

I asume the motherboard is the ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe.

I've just troubleshooted SATA drive problems on my own board ...
Unfortunately I didn't find any answers how to correct it, but I found
a work around.

I had two drives one Maxtor 160 GB SATA Drive (my system drive) and
one 250 GB SATA Seagate drive connected an experienced that they were
much slower than could be expected. With extensive disk use, they
would actually freeze, but it didn't happen too often, so I lived with
it.

I got this board because it has 8 SATA ports, I needed to connect 6 x
250 GB drives as a soft raid 5 (a windows soft raid NOT the inbuild
raid) - they were all Seagate 250 GB drives.

But the inbuild SIL3114 won't work as a simple SATA controller, so I
had to get a Promise SATA II 150 TX4 4 SATA port controller. I then
connected 4 of the Seagate 250 GB drives of the 6 drive raid to this
controller. And the 2 other of the 6 drive raid to the NVidia
controller, which will work as a simple SATA controller.

This was slow, this crashed and trashed my drives all the time.

I have now disabled BOTH the onboard Sil3114 and the onboard NVidia
SATA controllers and connect two Promise SATA II 150 TX4 4 sata port
controllers.

For 60 Hours now ... Not a single BSOD or breakdown (before it would
run max 2 hours IF I DIDN'T TOUCH THE COMPUTER, much less if I used
it!!). Not only that - it's considerable much faster

I don't know if the onboard controllers are bad, if they are not
compatible with the drive I have - or what.

If possible, try to disable the onboard SATA controllers and use an
external one - it will give you some idea, if it works for you.

regards Leif.

I have heard other people report problems with Maxtor drives on the on-board
SATA controllers. They changed one of the configuration options in the
device manager, but I don't remember exactly what it was (write caching or
something). I would also check with Maxtor to see if a firmware update is
available.

 

[Leif Nordmand Andersen]

Hi Mark,

I have heard other people report problems with Maxtor drives on the on-board
SATA controllers. They changed one of the configuration options in the
device manager, but I don't remember exactly what it was (write caching or
something). I would also check with Maxtor to see if a firmware update is
available.

Thank you for the reply.

Yes those are the DiamondMax10 disks.

Mine is a DiamondMax9, and shouldn't have this problem. But what has
caused of my drives not working on the onboard SATA controllers I
don't know.

Regards LEIF.

 

[Paul]

i checked, it is set to 1.5GB

especially i have a download folder, when i read that folder it will
take at least 5-10 min some time.
dont know how to trouble shoot.

Is this a problem with Windows attempting to preview
the contents of the download folder ? I seem to remember
a problem, where Windows would read entire movie files, to
get some vital statistics for the file, or to present
previews of the movie. Perhaps your computer is busy doing all
sorts of unnecessary work, every time the download folder is
opened.

Since you haven't described all the symptoms and exactly
how you are viewing your download folder, all I can suggest
is:

google on: windows explorer preview movie disable

If the CPU is running at 100% during those 5-10 minutes,
you know something is up. Try opening Task Manager and
see what processes are busy during the 5-10 minute interval.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Chandra]

you need to check under IDE controllers.
see which controller you are using for SATA
it will show you in the properties.

 

[Chandra]

This is just a download folder with all the files i download
no movies
no songs
just pure software

windows explorer is the process taking up 99% resources. when i am
browsing the download folder.

it happens often

 

[milleron]

This is just a download folder with all the files i download
no movies
no songs
just pure software

windows explorer is the process taking up 99% resources. when i am
browsing the download folder.

it happens often

I experienced a situation in which imaging software (not to mention
any names, but the initials are Acronis True Image) erroneously
started breaking the image file into 1-kilobyte fragments. This took
NO time to generate over 10,000 files, and the behavior when trying to
open the folder that contained them was just as you describe.
So, the question is, how many files do you have in your download
folder?

Ron

 

[Bill]

There already here in the form of USB pens,CF cards,SD cards and Memory
sticks. However looks like years before one will get a solid state device
big enough to internally fit in a pc using ATA or SATA type controller
interfaces. Memory is just to expensive for the size of drives available
these days. Maybe some very small GB drives will appear soon but thats all
surmising.

Steve

http://news.designtechnica.com/article7516.html

Bill

 

[Stephan Grossklass]

One source of tremendous disk thrashing and CPU load when opening
download folders is the zipfldr.dll Windows Explorer uses per default on
XP and later. That's why I remove the respective keys in the registry
pretty quickly after a (re)install. Speeds up things tremendously.

Stephan

 

[Alex Devlin]

you need to check under IDE controllers.
see which controller you are using for SATA
it will show you in the properties.

Hmm, I don't seem to have anything like that.

What I do have is this;

Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers

I have two of those and two each of the Primary and Secondary IDE Channel.

None of them have the option you were talking about.

Now the weird thing is I do have a SATA hard drive plugged into the SATA
connector on the Asus P4P800SE motherboard. But when I installed WinXP from
fresh I never needed to install any drivers, it saw the drive and installed
into it.

I ran HDTech and got a burst read of 125.6 MB/s and an average read of
47.4MB/s.

So I'm wondering if I can do anything to increase the speed. There doesn't
seem to be any drivers on the CD I got with the motherboard or the Intel
site for my chipset to update them.