P4P800-E Deluxe: SATA slower than PATA drives???

[Martin Hirsch]

Hi,

My original configuration consisted two PATA Maxtor 160gb drives on the
promise controller in a non-raid IDE configuration. These drives at boot up
show up in the promise bios as UDMA6 drives and are operating at the optimum
speed.

I then installed a new WD 360gb SATA drive on the Intel controller with a
fresh operating system (XPsp2) and made it the bootable drive. Since this
drive is SATA I expected equal or better performance than the original
Maxtor PATA drive installation but it was noticeably slower in every aspect
with just the operating system and a few programs installed.

I went into the bios and noticed the SATA drive was auto configuring as
UDMA5 on the Intel controller.

I then plugged the drive into the promise SATA connector on the MB and again
at boot up it showed up as a UDMA5 drive where the other two PATA drives
show up as UDMA6.

I have gone into the bios and made all the correct adjustments I believe.
When connected to the Intel controller I set the following:

"Onboard IDE Operate Mode" [Enhanced]
"Enhanced Mode Support On" [S-ATA]
"Configure SATA as RAID" [No]

The Maxtor drives are noticeably faster at 133mb/s than the new WD SATA
drive which I believe is running at 100mb/s.

How can I get the new SATA drive up to speed.

Thanks for any help!! Martin

 

[Daniel Mandic]

Hi,

My original configuration consisted two PATA Maxtor 160gb drives on
the promise controller in a non-raid IDE configuration. These drives
at boot up show up in the promise bios as UDMA6 drives and are
operating at the optimum speed.

I then installed a new WD 360gb SATA drive on the Intel controller
with a fresh operating system (XPsp2) and made it the bootable drive.
Since this drive is SATA I expected equal or better performance than
the original Maxtor PATA drive installation but it was noticeably
slower in every aspect with just the operating system and a few
programs installed.

I went into the bios and noticed the SATA drive was auto configuring
as UDMA5 on the Intel controller.

I then plugged the drive into the promise SATA connector on the MB
and again at boot up it showed up as a UDMA5 drive where the other
two PATA drives show up as UDMA6.

I have gone into the bios and made all the correct adjustments I
believe. When connected to the Intel controller I set the following:

"Onboard IDE Operate Mode" [Enhanced]
"Enhanced Mode Support On" [S-ATA]
"Configure SATA as RAID" [No]

The Maxtor drives are noticeably faster at 133mb/s than the new WD
SATA drive which I believe is running at 100mb/s.

How can I get the new SATA drive up to speed.

Thanks for any help!! Martin

Hi Martin!


Not even that, also (a good drived) AGP is faster than PCIx.




Best Regards,

Daniel Mandic

 

[deus maximus]

Hi,

My original configuration consisted two PATA Maxtor 160gb drives on the
promise controller in a non-raid IDE configuration. These drives at boot up
show up in the promise bios as UDMA6 drives and are operating at the optimum
speed.

I then installed a new WD 360gb SATA drive on the Intel controller with a
fresh operating system (XPsp2) and made it the bootable drive. Since this
drive is SATA I expected equal or better performance than the original
Maxtor PATA drive installation but it was noticeably slower in every aspect
with just the operating system and a few programs installed.

I went into the bios and noticed the SATA drive was auto configuring as
UDMA5 on the Intel controller.

I then plugged the drive into the promise SATA connector on the MB and again
at boot up it showed up as a UDMA5 drive where the other two PATA drives
show up as UDMA6.

I have gone into the bios and made all the correct adjustments I believe.
When connected to the Intel controller I set the following:

"Onboard IDE Operate Mode" [Enhanced]
"Enhanced Mode Support On" [S-ATA]
"Configure SATA as RAID" [No]

The Maxtor drives are noticeably faster at 133mb/s than the new WD SATA
drive which I believe is running at 100mb/s.

How can I get the new SATA drive up to speed.

Keep in mind that the speed rates for the two drive types are not
the speeds of the disks but only the maximum throughput on their
respective buses. To compare disk speeds go here
http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html
You may be suprised to learn the relative speeds of each disk you
have.
Secondly , just because a disk is UDMA 5 or 6 will not necessarily
determine its relative speed. The site above runs apps on each
drive so their benchmarks do give a speed comparison.

 

[Paul]

Keep in mind that the speed rates for the two drive types are not
the speeds of the disks but only the maximum throughput on their
respective buses. To compare disk speeds go here
http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html
You may be suprised to learn the relative speeds of each disk you
have.
Secondly , just because a disk is UDMA 5 or 6 will not necessarily
determine its relative speed. The site above runs apps on each
drive so their benchmarks do give a speed comparison.

Another surprise for Martin, would be this in the ICH5 datasheet.
This is in the section describing the PATA interface (pg.183)

http://developer.intel.com/design/chipsets/datashts/25251601.pdf

"reads at the maximum rate of 100 MB/s"
"write transfers at a maximum rate of 88.9 MB/s"

Inside a lot of the first SATA disk drives, there was a bridge
chip. In other words, they were still using the same PATA controller
chips as before, and to make a SATA interface, they just slapped
a chip onto the controller board, to bridge from SATA to PATA.
In fact, some of those bridges, only run at 100MB/sec.

There are all sorts of bottlenecks in the disk architecture,
and only benchmarking and looking at burst performance and
sustained transfer performance, will hint at exactly what you
got when you purchased your disks.

The best disks only sustain about 70MB/sec at the heads, so none
of these bottlenecks is really killing sustained transfer rate. Any
arguments here, are about burst-to-controller-cache performance.

Also, the seek time is an important parameter too. If looking
for files all over the disk, the answer only comes back, as
fast as the heads can be moved to the new area on the disk.
The biggest enabler there, is higher RPM rates, like 10K or
15K, instead of 7200 RPM. At 15K, SCSI is the answer.

Paul

 

[Newz]

Hi,

My original configuration consisted two PATA Maxtor 160gb drives on
the promise controller in a non-raid IDE configuration. These
drives at boot up show up in the promise bios as UDMA6 drives and
are operating at the optimum speed.

I then installed a new WD 360gb SATA drive on the Intel controller
with a fresh operating system (XPsp2) and made it the bootable
drive. Since this drive is SATA I expected equal or better
performance than the original Maxtor PATA drive installation but it
was noticeably slower in every aspect with just the operating system
and a few programs installed.

You're comparing 2 different brands of HD, two different controllers
and two different buses.
This makes it a bit hard.

First of all, is that WD HD a native SATA drive? WD so far has just
put SATA bridge chips on their SATA drives, meaning that the drive is
simply PATA. If you have one of these SATA-II drives, they are native
SATA.

Second, did WD ever embrace ATA-133? I believe Maxtor was the first to
do that and the others never really followed (IBM-Hitachi, WD). They
shouldn't need to either, as ATA-100 can cope with anything the drive
throws at it. Especially when you have 2 separate channels as the
Promise controller has.

Third, is your WD drive actually faster than the Maxtor 160? You need
to have a look at independent reviews. Don't expect SATA to be faster
than PATA. Because both buses are faster than the drives themselves,
the differences will likely be related to the drive performance.

Fourth, are you running the Intel Application Accelerator? Depending
on your motherboard chipset, this may give you a performance increase.

If you really want to test what's happening, you should run a Maxtor
on the Intel controller PATA side. That would allow you to rule out
the controller. Not entirely though, as the SATA interface on Intel
controllers is faster nowadays than the PATA.

Good luck!

Grtz,
Nwz

 

[Martin Hirsch]

My WD SATA model is WD3200JD and my PATA Maxtors are Y160PO. I don't believe
the WD is a SATA-II drive.

I have run the WD SATA drive on the promise controller with identical
results. It is noticably slower.

I'm not running the intel app accelerator. This would only benfefit drives
on the intel controller right?? If so I will install it and put back the WD
drive on the intel controller and see what happens.

If I run my Maxtor on the intel controller as you suggust , wouldn't that
hurt performance since these are 133 drives and the intel controller maxes
out at 100 for PATA??

 

[Paul]

My WD SATA model is WD3200JD and my PATA Maxtors are Y160PO. I don't believe
the WD is a SATA-II drive.

I have run the WD SATA drive on the promise controller with identical
results. It is noticably slower.

I'm not running the intel app accelerator. This would only benfefit drives
on the intel controller right?? If so I will install it and put back the WD
drive on the intel controller and see what happens.

If I run my Maxtor on the intel controller as you suggust , wouldn't that
hurt performance since these are 133 drives and the intel controller maxes
out at 100 for PATA??

If you run the Maxtor on the Promise controller, you are limited
by the practical burst rate on the PCI bus. While PCI is theoretically
133MB/sec, practically it is 100-110MB/sec. (To maximize it, you can
crank up "PCI Latency Timer" in the BIOS. That will give you a
better looking benchmark, but will cause other things not to work
smoothly on your computer, like perhaps audio.)

If you run the Maxtor on the Southbridge, you are limited by the IDE
interface design. (The Intel datasheet claims the Southbridge does
have good "plumbing" inside, as the interface to the Northbridge
runs at 266MB/sec. It is just the interface to the disk that doe
not care to embrace the ATA133 standard.)

A native SATA drive (no bridge chip inside), plus the Southbridge,
is the only way on that motherboard to get a burst rate
higher than about 100MB/sec.

Southbridge benchmark RAID0 - Raptor disks can manage 2x70MB/sec
by spec, and the benchmark maxes at 122MB/sec write, and 100MB/sec
read.

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showpost.php?p=595566

Promise benchmark RAID0 - the poster thinks this is hot stuff ?

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showpost.php?p=650264

Based on the Southbridge benchmark, it still appears that
really good transfer rates will not be possible. Why it only makes
it to 122MB/sec is a puzzle.

I would say there _is_ something up with the innards of the
Southbridge. For example, look at this 4 disk RAID0 array
on an ICH7R Southbridge. It is flatlined at 160MB/sec for
most of the surface of the array, implying there is a
"plumbing" problem inside the Southbridge. That is only
40MB/sec per disk.

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94560&highlight=ich7r+raid

Maybe the only way to get flashy benchmarks, is go S939 ?
(Haven't seen any benches for those...)

The results here look a bit different, so perhaps this
is some kind of benchmarking issue:

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=serialcompare&page=6

Paul