Raptor 150GB and HD Tach

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Jan 1, 2007
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Does this look right to you? It's a brand new 150GB Raptor drive. Bearing in mind i've recently installed Vista, i still don't think it should look like this.

 
looks fine.
If MSPaint's canvas is smaller than the pasted image, it will auto expand to a perfect fit. The PNG or GIF compression algorithms will provide a smaller and higher quality image compared to JPG if the source contains large areas of uniform color and sharp edges, such as charts and text.
 
Looks fine to me, and Vista's indexing features run in low I/O mode so as soon as HDTach kicks in and says "Gimme the drive" the indexing stops and gets out of the way; it has no bearing on the benchmark performance past that point.

If you're using Paint, and based on that pic I'd say you are, Vista's version of Paint has one new feature most people don't even realize is there yet: Crop. It's under the Image menu option at the top. Paste the pic, choose Image - Crop, and it'll get rid of extraneous info around the actual image.

Alt+PrintScreen is still the fastest and most efficient way to snap a shot of the application with focus. The Snipping Tool is ok but, I can "snap" the shot with Alt+PrintScreen and paste it into Paint, crop it, and save it out before most people can even open the Snipping Tool.

But the drive looks fine. Raptors are nice, but they ain't all that.

If you have that Raptor attached to an SATA I port on an older mobo, that would be a definite reason for the low burst speed, so verify that - if you have SATA II ports and controllers on your mobo, make sure they're operating in SATA II or AHCI mode and not just SATA/ATA mode which would keep them backwards compatible with the SATA I standards of 150MB/s max.

Hope this helps...
 
Thank you for your help. I'll have a browse around the BIOS later, and see what i come up with. Off the top of my head, on my ASUS P5K Deluxe, there's a "SATA Configuration" sub-menu and a different sub-menu for my hard drive. I'm guessing it'd be in one of those, correct? I'll have a look in a minute and report back the options i'm given.
 
Here are some images of my BIOS:

SATA Configuration






Hard Drive Configuration


Do you know what i'd need to alter?

Thank you.
 
If you have that Raptor attached to an SATA I port on an older mobo, that would be a definite reason for the low burst speed, so verify that - if you have SATA II ports and controllers on your mobo, make sure they're operating in SATA II or AHCI mode and not just SATA/ATA mode which would keep them backwards compatible with the SATA I standards of 150MB/s max.
From my understanding none of the Raptors support the SATA-io 3Gbps signaling feature. They do -however- have support for NCQ, another SATA-io feature. I do not know if NCQ has any benefit in a single-user environment.
 
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