Is my SATA drive performing Slow??

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I recently added a new 200GB Sata 2 (3Gbits) HD to my PC:
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6V200E0

I reinstalled Windows, and used my other Seagate 300GB (IDE) HD as backup.

Everything went smooth, windows installed just fine.

But now, when I benchmark the new drive with Sandra 07, I'm getting about about 69 mb/sec read on the physical disk test with a very high Randon Access time of 17-19ms. With the file system transfer speed I get ~57mB/sec and 14ms.

I did the same tests on the other "slower" IDE drive, and got better results..!!
(69 mb/sec read physical with 14ms, and 69mb/sec with 10-11 random access on the file transfer test)

I know its not a big difference, but shoudn't a SataII drive be much faster than an IDE format??

I also tried HD Tach Bench and got these results:

Maxtor 6V200E0 200GB SATA2
bench1.JPG


You can see the low average read of 57 mb/sec, and slow random access of 14.4ms (according to the drive specs. this should be more like 8-9ms) Even if it has a high *burst* speed, it drops pretty quickly.

Now check out the secondary IDE drive
Seagate 300GB IDE
bench2.JPG


This draws a more stable line with a higher 64.9mb/sec and lower access time.

Any Ideas?? I'm running an ASUS A8N32-Sli deluxe Board with Nforce4 chipset. I already installed the chipset drivers including Nvidia IDE/SATA drivers.

Oh one more thing.. for some weird reason, windows detects my sata drive as a removable/portable drive. Of course, it won't let me stop the device.
pic3.JPG


Please advise!
 
First off, your pictures dont work.

Secondly, I never recomend using SATA and IDE on the same system.

thirdly, perhaps your motherboard doesnt support SATAII

Fourthly it is probably slow because windows is using that drive at the moment of benchmarking. If you want to know the true speed, you will need to set it up as slave and run it then.

Regards,

Korrupt
 
I don't know about the benchmarks, but the Safely Remove thingie happens for a lot of people when using SATA drives. I would ignore it, and do not try to remove your HD while it is in use lol ;)
 
Pics not working?
Strange. Maybe try these direct links..

HD Tach Benchmark for SATA drive:
http://www.geocities.com/sandrodz/bench1.JPG

HD Tach Benchmark for IDE drive:
http://www.geocities.com/sandrodz/bench2.JPG

Example of removable media issue:
http://www.geocities.com/sandrodz/pic3.JPG

I have tried installing Windows ONLY on the SATA drive with the same results.
I have also tried the SATA drive as the secondary drive, and the benchmarks give off the same results.

The ASUS A8N32-Sli deluxe board is 100% compatible with SATA and SATAII specs. It has native support through Nforce4 chipset and Silicon Image Sil3132.

I'm wondering, what should be the normal average/sustained read speeds of a SATA2 drive? I'm sure IDE can't perform faster than sata?

Does anyone have any scores to compare? (I'm not running in Raid 0 config.)

Please help, this feeling of underachievement is driving me nuts! I need my peace of mind...!

P.S. So.. is the removable device icon really a normal side effect to SATA drives???
 
Personally I find the speed rates from IDE to SATA hardly worth the price of transferring. It's hardly noticable for the average user.
 
This all looks about right...

Transfer speeds will be just about identical between your drives. Your 300GB drive is larger and larger drives tend to have faster sustained transfer rates because of larger platters, although I don't know if this is the case. This may be what's giving it the edge (if testing it consistent). The results are so simliar though, that I certainly wouldn't consider one faster than the other. And it certainly won't be noticeable.

Your SATA's low seek time is probably because of Maxtor's AAM (Acoustic management) technology. Most drives come with 'silent' enabled, which lowers the seek speed (not very noticable) so the drive is quieter. You can enable performance mode instead. Check out http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/m...channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software+Downloads for the software to do it.

And lastly, just to be sure you know, IDE and SATA drives are both the same mechnically (generally speaking). The interface (SATA and IDE) is not a bottleneck, the drive itself is. You can plug a drive into a Ultra-SATA x512 port from the year 2120 and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.
 
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