Improve disk performance

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ppucci

n00b
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Feb 11, 2008
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Hi There,

I have a Seagate Barracuda 80Gb 7200.7 ST380817AS wich is SATA 1 on an ASUS P5GDC Deluxe motherboard. The HD manual says it is capable of UDMA mode 6 ATA/133 and so does the motherboard manual, however I can only bring it up to UDMA 5 ATA/100. The drive is connected using the 7pin cable to the SATA 1 controller. The motherboard manual, however, is somewhat confusing on this, as it only talks about ATA/133 on the IDE controller (80pin) section.

Is it possible to bring the SATA controller up to ATA/133 with that disk? Am I mixing two different things (SATA and IDE ATA/133)?

I also just bought a "new" Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST380815AS SATA 2 and I am going to install it in parallel with the old one. Will this one work up to ATA/133?

On a different issue concerning performance, I want to distribute the OS (WinXP Pro), page file, apps, and documents among these two drives. Does anybody have a suggestion on how should I make this distribution? I was thinking...:

New 80G SATA2: OS and documents
Old 80G SATA1: Page file and applications

What do you guys think about it?
 
I am not any kind of expert on the differences between IDE and SATA interfaces, but I will give it my best.

Sata's native interface is the AHCI interface, that allows all of the advantages of SATA. If your MOBO does not support AHCI, it will try to emulate various IDE modes, depending on the Bios.

When I looked at my new system, I noticed it was in IDE emulation mode. So I switched it over to AHCI, booted up, it automagically loaded drivers, rebooted, and now I am in REAL Sata II mode. I am running HD Tune Right now to see if it makes any difference.

Nope, exactly the same numbers in HD Tune. I am running a Seagate 7200.11 500 gig drive. It was in SATA I emulation mode from the factory. The first run through HD TUNE produced a Burst speed that was barely higher than the Max transfer speed. I removed the jumper next to the SATA connector, and now the burst speed is almost twice as fast as the maximum transfer speed.

Make sure your MOBO has the latest BIOS, as that may include the latest settings also.

Don
 
Hi Don, thank you for your input... I know the motherboard has AHCI support 'cause I remember seeing it, I wasn't sure if that was what I was looking for. I'll give it a try when I'm at home and see if it makes a difference.
 
Hi there again. I tried to config the motherboard to use AHCI and it did not work. It would boot and check fine, but when it went to the XP loading page, the blue progress bar would not start scrooling and soon after that the computer reboots by itself. If left alone, that will happen in a loop.... switching back to IDE reverted to normal behavior.

Any thoughts?
 
Sounds like XP has some kind of driver problem, like it doesn't know what to do?

What happens in safe mode?
 
I believe that XP does not have the driver for AHCI by default. When I switched over to AHCI on my MBin XP, it worked fine. I can only assume that when I loaded the chipset drivers from ASUS after installing windows that they included the AHCI driver there. A little digging on some tech support sites and I see that if you want to have AHCI on when you install XP, you need to use the F6 driver diskette thing to get windoz to load. Vista does include AHCI support.

Check on the driver CD that came with your MB, or check the web site.

Again, I noticed no improvement in performance after the switch, so you prolly aren't missing anything.

Learning new stuff every day.

BTW, when setting up your drive, just keep your page file separate from the OS and the rest of the stuff doesn't matter too much. I like to keep my data separate from the OS, in case I have to reinstall. But XP is so stable now that I rarely have to reinstall anymore. Not like the bad ol days of reinstalling every 4-6 months.

Don
 
If you are worried about performance, dont use the 80GB drive it will be quite a lot slower than the modern drives.
For example the new 500GB drives should be able to sustain at least 80MB/s down to around 40MB/s.
The 80GB drive will likely be about 1/2 that.
You should be able to see this with the results from HDTune.
 
Hi everybody... sorry for the delay, a one-month baby can keep you really busy!

- About safe mode: no good, lock's up.
- About 500Gb drives: I wish, but had a USD$30,00 budget, that was the best I could do (I live in Brazil, things are a lot more expensive here... but someday I'll get there).
- About AHCI not improving the performance: Well, if that's the fact, I won't bother anymore with that.

But then there's one thing that still bothers me: The SATA 1 Disk supports ATA133, so does the motherboard... but no matter what I change at the BIOS config, it will only come up with ATA100 (according to SIW and Sandra). I know that performance would be better with ATA133, but don't know what to do... any thoughts?

Thank you all!
 
Well, in that case, it sounds like an issue of the bios not emulating the IDE interface very well. The actual interface from your drive to the mobo is sata 1. It's just inside the mobo where it is converted to ide emulation and the commands are transposed. Have you checked to see if you have the latest Bios for your MOBO? Maybe a polite inquiry to their tech support, or check to see if they have some forums or a knowledge base on their web site.

Hmm, now this is interesting.

Asus Knowledge Base article

It is on the third screen of questions labeled "Does Intel ICH9 controller support AHCI function?"

Acording to them, the Intel ICH9 southbridge does not support ACHI commands. I guess that's why mine made no difference when I turned on ACHI in my Bios.

I am checking now to see if I have the latest Bios for my board.

Congrats on the new munchkin. My baby girl is 16 now, and officially smarter than both her parents. :cool:

Don
 
Thats messed up but explains the performance I got too if it applies to the chipset in general.
I have a Gigabyte X38 DS4 and noticed that AHCI wasnt enabled in the BIOS so I gave it a try.
To cut a long story short, I couldnt enable AHCI on this install as the drivers need to be installed while installing Windows and cant be installed in Windows until this is done, doh.
(there are some hacks but none of them stopped the blue screen on boot)

So I installed Windows on another drive with the AHCI driver but it made no real difference to the performance (using HDTune).
My WD 500GB drive used to peak sustained at just over 80MB/s and burst rate is around 120MB/s.
Now it peaks the same but the burst rate is 137MB, sadly still way short of the capability of the 3Gb interface.

I'll research more.
 
It's weird for me, cause according to Asus's web site, my board does not support AHCI. But when I enabled it, windows XP installed a new driver and told me I needed to reboot to take advantage of my new hardware. (I'm assuming the chipset drivers I loaded for my mobo had AHCI support.) Even then, I saw now difference with my HD Tune readings.

The only difference I got was when I removed the jumper on my drive to enable SATA II support. Then my burst mode went from 110 to 190 MB/S. It did not affect the sustained readings.

I wonder if a stand alone controller card with built in AHCI would make a difference?

Don
 
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