500GB 5000YS SATA-II ,need help

[Darren_uk]

Hi can someone give me some help, i just installed a single
Western Digital Caviar RE2 500GB 5000YS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM
into my (abit AN8 -SLI NFORCE 4 mobo) i pluged it into sata 1 slot on the mobo ,went into the bios & enabled all the serial -ata 1 & 2 &
sata DMA Transfer then saved settings then booted windows xp pro with sp2
cd rom -when it came to the partition page it showed the hd space of 476285MB

First Q) Is that right it missing 24 gig of making 500gig ?

anyway i went on to making 3 partitons
50 gig partition for the os
200 gig partition for data
230 odd partition for data

leaving 8 meg of unpartition space

formatted c partition -NTFS -Installed window xp pro all went ok
installed me drivers & nvidia nforce 4 drives -6.86_nforce_win2kxp_international_whql
checked the IDE ata/atapi controllers
looked at the - Nvidia nforce4 serial ATA controller
come up ok- serial ATA Generation 2 -3G on the primary channel ,it had the tick & the other options
below it -i clicked on the speed test button ,it did the test & said this

Theoretical limit ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++300.0
Burst speed +++++++++112.4
Sustained speed++++73.0

Q) are them speeds ok ,is that about right ?


some other things i.m not sure of
when the i restart the pc ,at the post screen it says this
(IDE Channel 3 Master Disk :LBA,ATA 133,500gb)

Q) is that right it being on that ?

1 more thing do i have to enable the raid controllers in the raid config
thay are all disabled?

please help me

 

[rpstewart]

The missing 24Gb is the usual HDD manufacturers saying 1000 bytes = 1Kb whereas windows says it's 1024 bytes to the kb.

Speeds look fine

POST screen looks fine, all BIOSes have the habit of referring to SATA controllers as if they were another IDE one.

If you're not using RAID, which with a single drive in the machine I assume you aren't then there's no need to enable any RAID controllers.

 

[mosfet]

First Q) Is that right it missing 24 gig of making 500gig ?

HDD manufacturers correctly use the base-10 counting system for storage measuements, whereas windows does not.

Your hard drive is capable of storing 500GB, but windows counts 1GB as 1024MB, rather than 1000. This is where you 'lose' some gigabytes.

See here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Q) are them speeds ok ,is that about right ?

Those speeds are very good, 73MB/s is faster than the first generation of WD Raptor drives. I wish my 5000YS was internal so I could make use of that. The 300 is there because it's on a SATA 3Gbps controller, the 112.4MB/s shows the max transfer rate from the cache over the SATA interface.

Q) is that right it being on that ?

Yup

1 more thing do i have to enable the raid controllers in the raid config
thay are all disabled?

Only if you want to take advantage of your motherboard's RAID controller. If not, let it be and enjoy your monster hard drive.

 

[nick_lerwill]

yes don't worry about this i have 300gb but only have 280-ish gigs

 

[Darren_uk]

thx

thx all - for the help

darren