P4T533 Raid Controller

[HDJulie]

I have this motherboard & until now have had the hard drive attached to the
primary ide cable. The system shows it to be UDMA 5. I ran SiSoft Sandra
on it & it benchmarked around 33. I decided to try the drive on the Raid
controller (Promise FastTrak133 Lite) which is supposed to be an ATA133
controller & ran Sandra again. This time I get anywhere from 29 - 32. I
thought that ATA133 was UDMA 6 & I thought that this controller would make
the drive faster. I am not using the RAID capabilities of the controller --
I want it only for UDMA. I've been doing some research & have seen mention
of the Lumberjack bios hacks. So, I have a few questions:

1) Shouldn't the RAID controller be faster than the IDE controller?
2) How can I tell what UDMA the system is using for the drive while on the
RAID controller. I don't see that anywhere in Device Manager.
3) Would using a Lumberjack bios make the controller faster & if so, which
one would I want -- Full Raid, or PureUDMA?

Thanks,

Julie

 

[Stephan Grossklass]

I have this motherboard & until now have had the hard drive attached to the
primary ide cable. The system shows it to be UDMA 5. I ran SiSoft Sandra
on it & it benchmarked around 33.

Forget Sandra as a hard drive benchmark.

I decided to try the drive on the Raid
controller (Promise FastTrak133 Lite) which is supposed to be an ATA133
controller & ran Sandra again. This time I get anywhere from 29 - 32. I
thought that ATA133 was UDMA 6 & I thought that this controller would make
the drive faster. I am not using the RAID capabilities of the controller --
I want it only for UDMA. I've been doing some research & have seen mention
of the Lumberjack bios hacks. So, I have a few questions:

1) Shouldn't the RAID controller be faster than the IDE controller?

Not necessarily. It's attached to the PCI bus (133 MB/s burst max, but
~90-110 MB/s realistic, and shared with a bunch of other devices), which
is attached to the southbridge, while the onboard IDE is attached
directly to the southbridge, which has a 266 MB/s HubLink interface to
the northbridge. Also, performance on Promise controllers using the Lite
RAID BIOS has been found to be suboptimal. Also, chances are your hard
drive does not even support UDMA133 (until recently, only Maxtor used
that).

2) How can I tell what UDMA the system is using for the drive while on the
RAID controller. I don't see that anywhere in Device Manager.

On a normal Promise UltraXYZ controller, this is shown during bootup.

3) Would using a Lumberjack bios make the controller faster & if so, which
one would I want -- Full Raid, or PureUDMA?

The latter, if anything.

IMHO you can connect your hard drive to the onboard IDE again; should it
really be too slow (which it does not seem to be), only a hard drive
upgrade will *significantly* boost performance.

Stephan

 

[HDJulie]

Thanks for the information! One more thing -- I am using a Maxtor 120GB
drive so it *should* get UDMA 6. I think I'll go back to the IDE
connection. That way, I don't have the lousy boot up delay from the RAID
controller.

 

[HDJulie]

Oh, I forgot to ask -- what kind of hard drive upgrade could I do to
significantly improve performance? I'm using a Maxtor 120GB with 8MB cache
now. Should I go to a SCSI drive?

 

[Matt]

Try HDTach for a benchmark

 

[Stephan Grossklass]

Oh, I forgot to ask -- what kind of hard drive upgrade could I do to
significantly improve performance? I'm using a Maxtor 120GB with 8MB cache
now. Should I go to a SCSI drive?

The only thing that would be significantly faster than your current hard
drive is a current 15k rpm SCSI drive (of which the Seagate Cheetah
15K.3 is the most "desktop friendly" noise wise - you'll just need to
cool it). I don't know, however, whether you'd want to spend the money
on the drive, an U160 (or U320) host adapter and U160/U320 cable.

Stephan

 

[HDJulie]

No, I don't want to spend the money just yet. It's not like the system is
slow as it is. I'd just like for everything to pop open instantly, as soon
as I click on it . I'll wait until I can afford to build another new
system with an 800FSB, processor with HT, etc, etc, etc. Thanks so much for
your help!

Julie

 

[tk]

P4T533 IDE controllers omly support UDMA 5 according to my manual you need
to
use the Raid controller to get UDMA 6.

I have 3 different drives on my Promise controller and it sees them as
individual
arrays and runs great.