Hitachi SATA II Drives

D

DNA

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 7, 2004
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109
The following text is from an Abit Forum thread.
"For what it is worth, the Hitachi drives ship with SATA 1 selected as the default. I downloaded the utility from the hitachi website which lets you change the setting to SATA II. The fastest burst speed was 203 with 63 as the fastest sustained speed. Theoretical is of course 300.

I enabled the SSC as well as SATA II with the utility and just left SSC disabled in the BIOS. All this was done after installing windows to the drive. I didn't try doing it before, because I didn't know I had to specifically select SATA II for it to work."

Per poster's comments, I just used the Hitachi Feature Tool Utility to set my RAID 0 Hitachi drives to SATA II rates. Ran HD TACH Utility and burst went from 220MB/s to 330MB/s. Average read increased slightly from 95MB/s to 97MB/s. Also checked Windows Device Manager and it displays "SATA Generation 2 - 3G", was at "SATA Generation I - 1.5G".
 
Not to crap on what you're saying, but there is no way in hell that any drives are breaking the 150mb/s theoretical bandwidth limit of SATA-I, so there should be no difference in it being set to "SATA-II". Perhaps that changes some NCQ settings, which could effect speed, but those numbers seem very out there and wrong for that kind of change. In the case of a RAID-0 array, again it would not matter as each port has dedicated bandwidth, 150mb/sec/drive. Until drives are breaking that individually, SATA-II's increased bandwidth won't mean anything*. I don't know what "HD Utility" is, but would you mind downloading HD Tach and posting back with those results? For reference, not even 10K RPM SATA drives break 150mb/sec burst.


*Well, until multiplexers become a reality and we can stick multiple drives on one channel. But for now, I stand by my statement
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Not to crap on what you're saying, but there is no way in hell that any drives are breaking the 150mb/s theoretical bandwidth limit of SATA-I, so there should be no difference in it being set to "SATA-II". Perhaps that changes some NCQ settings, which could effect speed, but those numbers seem very out there and wrong for that kind of change. In the case of a RAID-0 array, again it would not matter as each port has dedicated bandwidth, 150mb/sec/drive. Until drives are breaking that individually, SATA-II's increased bandwidth won't mean anything*. I don't know what "HD Utility" is, but would you mind downloading HD Tach and posting back with those results? For reference, not even 10K RPM SATA drives break 150mb/sec burst.


*Well, until multiplexers become a reality and we can stick multiple drives on one channel. But for now, I stand by my statement
Click to expand...

My mistake, the utility that I used is HD TACH. I'm using the ABIT AN8 Fatal1ty Motherboard which supports SATA II rates. The burst that I recored on my RAID 0 Hitachi's was 330MB/s. Yes, I will post the results in the HD TACH data base.

My RAID 0 36G Raptors burst rate was 130MB/s using an Abit NF7 Motherboard
 
Hmm, interesting. If it were an issue of increased bandwidth, shouldn't your old settings have yielded 300mb/s or close to it with overhead considered, so perhaps somewhere around 260mb/s? Would you mind posting screenshots of the graph from HD Tach? That's quite a killer transfer rate from two SATA drives. Actually, now that I think about it, are we talking about two drives, or four drives? It would seem much more plausable if it were four drives.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Hmm, interesting. If it were an issue of increased bandwidth, shouldn't your old settings have yielded 300mb/s or close to it with overhead considered, so perhaps somewhere around 260mb/s? Would you mind posting screenshots of the graph from HD Tach? That's quite a killer transfer rate from two SATA drives. Actually, now that I think about it, are we talking about two drives, or four drives? It would seem
much more plausable if it were four drives.
Click to expand...

Were talking about (2) drive RAID 0. I did upload my results to HD TACH. You explain to me how to capature the HD TACH results and I'll post them. I can't click and copy the HD TACH screen>
 
Print screen will copy the screen to the clipboard, then you can paste into paint or whatever's your poison. Jpeg or png it before uploading, though.
 
His scores make sense. For a burst rate, each of his drives could have gone up to about 160MB/s at one point. This is obviously much greater than their average, but very possible. When you combine the two they could get around 320.
 
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