Burst Speed Woes

M

Max Power

Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2005
Messages
515
I recently purchased a 500GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue for my laptop and prompty benchmarked it with HDTach. Almost everything is in line with the reviews except for burst speed which is only an appalling 122MB/sec whereas they were able to get nearly double this .

Does anyone have any idea what could cause such a thing? Could it be my RAM?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Here too.
 
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What laptop? What chipset? Without that info, we don't know if you ran the drive on a SATA150 controller or a SATA300 controller. Also, make sure the drive doesn't have a SATA150 jumper on the back.
 
enginurd said:
What laptop? What chipset? Without that info, we don't know if you ran the drive on a SATA150 controller or a SATA300 controller. Also, make sure the drive doesn't have a SATA150 jumper on the back.
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Sorry about that. It's an A8JS which has the Intel 945 mobile chipset. There was no jumper on the drive.
 
*Bump*

There's no AHCI option in the BIOS. I called tech support and they said they had the same laptop there with an AHCI option. Could this be the culprit?
 
I don't know the answer but burst speed is not a big deal.

The only thing that has affected my burst speed was actually running in IDE compatability mode instead of installing the SATA drivers but you're not near the 150MB/sec cap.

Burst speed is based on the drive's cache and it kinda seems like your's isn't there or limited?
 
Old Hippie said:
I don't know the answer but burst speed is not a big deal.

The only thing that has affected my burst speed was actually running in IDE compatability mode instead of installing the SATA drivers but you're not near the 150MB/sec cap.

Burst speed is based on the drive's cache and it kinda seems like your's isn't there or limited?
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Pretty much, although the actual read speed is 65 or so (around half my burst speed) so it could be.. related. Seems odd though, you'd think that flash memory (what I can only assume the cache is made of) would be pretty indestructible. Maybe I should try the drive in another computer and see what I get.
 
if your getting full drive speed i wouldnt worry too much about it, burst speed really means nothing.

did you try HDTune?
 
I did install the Intel chipset drivers if that's what you mean, but since AHCI won't work I can't load those ones.
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Sounds like you have the cart before the horse. AHCI depends upon SATA , not the other way around.

If you're running XP, it looks like you need to install the Intel Storage manager to change the IDE mode from compatable to enhanced.

IDK if that will fix your burst rate but again, it's not a big deal.
 
I may have just figured it out. HDTune says that the drive is running in "UDMA Mode 6 (Ultra ATA/133)". I'm thinking it's running in some sort of compatibility mode such as what you mentioned! Only problem is that I don't see any of those options in my BIOS. Hmm.

Oh and I'm running Vista BTW - shouldn't be a driver problem, should it?
 
saedrin said:
Don't rule it out, it certainly wouldn't hurt to upgrade the drivers too.
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Hmm, well the "Intel Storage Matrix" drivers (I'm assuming these are what you mean) won't install without AHCI enabled. I'm thinking maybe there's a problem with my BIOS?
 
In the device manager under IDE controllers, what does it say and can you update it?
 
AFAIK, you're at the top of your lappies game.

Vista can be installed in IDE or SATA mode however I'm not familiar enough with your chipset or machine to determine if it can be implemented.

The ICH7 family is 3 generations old and may never give you the full burst speed of the HD.

Like you've been told before, it's no big deal.

Maybe someone can do better than I but good luck!
 
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