SATA II Hard drive setup - ASRock

[skljohnson]

I just put together a new system and ran some benchmarks w/sisoft sandra.

The Samsung SATA II SP2004C hard drive (52MB/sec) was slower that the Seagate IDE drive (53MB/sec).

XP Home is loaded on the samsung drive and the seagate drive is only for mp3's, video, storage, etc.

Is there something I am doing wrong on the setup of this Motherboard or do I need some additional drivers that Samsung doesn't seem to have on there website.

Most specs should be in sig.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks SJ

 

[Ronin]

Did you actually update your SATA drivers? I haven't looked at SATA II drive performance lately, but that does seem slow. Maybe I'll throw one of my T7K250's in a box today and see how it runs to compare.

 

[Pabster]

SATA-II doesn't currently offer any great performance difference difference over SATA-I. And SATA-I offers little over IDE.

 

[skljohnson]

Maybe I should buy another drive and set them up in a RAID0 or 1?
1 is a mirror of the other? 0 - if you lose one drive you lose both?

 

[Ronin]

Pretty much (Stripe vs Mirror, where Stripe offers sustained data transfer performance, there's no failsafe, and Mirror that offers redundancy, but you lose a full drive's worth of space).

 

[bladephoenix]

Originally posted by: Pabster
SATA-II doesn't currently offer any great performance difference difference over SATA-I. And SATA-I offers little over IDE.

I read something like this regarding ATA100. It went something like this. ATA100 transfer rate of 100MB/s only applies when the CPU does not find the data in its cache or system memory, AND the data in question is currently being held in the HDD cache (NOT on the actual platters). The same holds true for SATA 150, or SATA 300 drives -- the practial application of their maximum transfer rates only apply when the data is being held in its HDD cache.

If the data is NOT in cache, then the HDD must look in the platters, and unless the data in question is located at the EXACT spot where the head is currently at (which is chanced next to nil...its like playing roulette with zillions of sectors), the maximum transfer rate is pretty much a pointless number. From what I have read, SATA II does not offer any noticeable performance over SATA I, which in turn, has not noticeable benefit over ATA 100. In fact ATA 100 does not make a difference over ATA 66, and is only MARGINALLY faster than ATA 33.

I heard that WD Raptors are the preffered weapon of choice for this reason.