Seagate jumper maddness

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mindstormsguy

Gawd
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Nov 4, 2002
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So just recently I built my new system (see sig). Now, I've worked with sata drives before, but I've never owned one myself until now (yeah, I know...). So today I was just playing around with my drive (well, not really) and I noticed the jumper on the back. Now, I had noticed this jumper before, but I just kind of ignored it. It's so small and inset, I figured it wasn't really meaningful to me. Well today I got curious and figured out what it is. Now, I'm sure most of you already know what it is; its a selector for 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s data rates. Okay. But here's what got me, the drives shipped with the jumpers in the 1.5 Gb/s position. That's madness. I can't imagine how many people must be running sata II drives at sata I speeds.

After switching the jumpers on my drives, my array performance went from a 223.6 MB/s burst speed to a 340.4 MB/s burst. That's a 52% performance increase just because of an ignorant mistake being corrected.

Why do I post this? I don't want anyone else to make the same stupid mistake I made. If you own a 7200.10 series drive (or maybe even others), check your jumper! And if I helped you, let me know :p
 
i have 2 Seagate 7200.10 320gb. Initially, i did'nt know about that. But after i removed the pin, only the HDTach scores look better. I don't really feel any performance increase.
 
I know benchmarks are sometimes deceiving, but a 50% increase is a lot. HDs are the slowest part in a computer, I'll take any performance increase I can get.

Just a thought, but maybe if you don't notice a difference its just because you haven't really done any tasks that could benefit from this type of improvement. (I doubt random data access would speed up at all, for example).
 
i'm actually more interested in the average read and write. burst speed not important for me because i transfer huge files between my hard drives.

anyway, my main hdd is the WD740GB Raptor. So maybe that's why i don't see the difference for the Seagate 7200.10's.
 
mindstormsguy said:
Just a thought, but maybe if you don't notice a difference its just because you haven't really done any tasks that could benefit from this type of improvement. (I doubt random data access would speed up at all, for example).
Click to expand...
Burst speeds mean almost nothing in the real world, as you may have noticed.

Some sata II features (NCQ, etc) may also be disabled by that jumper, which could help server performance (if that's what you're using it for) somewhat. So removing it might help - but for most people, there's no difference in performance between 1.5 and 3 gbps, and compatibility may be better in some cases with the jumper on.
 
about NCQ (Native Command Queueing), may i know what is it for?
 
When many requests are outstanding at once, the drive itself can re-order them to serve them in a more logical order. The operating system generally tries to do this, but doing it again on the drive can lead to better performance.

However, this only really has an impact with multiple uncompleted requests, which only happens under heavy random I/O load. That doesn't happen a lot on desktops.
 
Okay, so your burst rate is bigger. WHere does this help? Burst, from what I understand, only farts out what is in the cache before it has to go to disk access.

The cache is only 16MB. The average computer game has data files in excess of 1GB these days. Added burst speed will do approximately nothing to help in this case. Even with smaller files, like DiVXs or porn or something, it doesn't do that much unless you've got a server serving up less than 16MB of the same set of files, all the time.

As for the 1.5 GB/s vs 3.0 GB/s... I wish. If my seagates could do that, they'd literally catch fire in no time flat.
 
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