SATA 2 speeds?

Buffalo2102

Buffalo2102

Buffalo2102

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I have just installed 2 x Samsung HD080HJ drives in RAID 0 on a Gigabyte DS3. This board uses the jMicron 363 SATA II controller and I was expecting to see some pretty good burst rates using HDTach.

However, I am only seeing burst speeds of about 140Mb/s, as shown here



I have found other sites posting benchmarks of these drives and they are getting much higher speeds. Between 250 and 320MB/s.

Am I just getting SATA 150 speeds out of this controller/drives? Is there anything else I am supposed to do to get SATA 300 speeds?

I have tried reinstalling the controller driver, using the jMicron driver instead of the Gigabyte driver, enabling/disabling write caching and indexing, reinstalling Windows.....
 
There are probably a jumper on each of the drives which is limiting the drives to SATA150 speeds. Removing this will improve only the burst speeds, not the sustained transfer rates.

However you won't see any real world difference if you do this.
 
joeyjojo said:
If it's not a jumper you will need a samsung utility disc of some sort.
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Sorry, I should have given a bit more detail. These drives are supposed to be SATA II out of the box but there is a facility to install a jumper on the front of the drive to force the drives to SATA I, incase you are using a legacy controller and the auto negotiation doesn't work. There is no jumper installed so they should be at the default SATA II speed.
 
In that case then you'll need to turn your attention to the controller driver settings, they may be set to SATA150.

To be honest however I wouldn't bother, getting the burst speed up isn't going to give you a performance improvement.
 
rpstewart said:
In that case then you'll need to turn your attention to the controller driver settings, they may be set to SATA150.

To be honest however I wouldn't bother, getting the burst speed up isn't going to give you a performance improvement.
Click to expand...

Thanks for bearing with me.

There are no controller options that I can find. I have looked under the properties in Device Manager for the controller and the RAID disk. I have also checked in Disk Management under Administative Tools. There is nothing in the RAID controller BIOS for this, although it does say that the disks are SATA2 capable.

I am aware that I am not likely to get any performance increase with this but it's just one of those things where you know that something is wrong and you have to get to the bottom of it......
 
As above, it's probably a jumper (small plastic thing with a piece of metal inside to join a pair of pins). You'll have to look on the drive for it, and take it off to enable sata2.

Apaprently it's a better solution to make them Old Sata by default. If there's no jumper for it and it's definitely sata2, possibly a utilities disc to enable it.
 
Was gonna just quickly mention that my WD Raptor 74Gb drive is actually slower than my 250Gb Samsung SATA 2 drive, which I found rather worrying. When I did a test using HD Tach 3, I was very worried on the speed difference. But I think it was a drive fault or something mind..

Either way, the Samsung is still faster than the raptor so I wouldnt ever recommend buying another one... personally mind :)
 
Just uploaded results, here's the thumbnail links :)

Raptor


Samsung


And a Maxtor drive that everyone hates...


For the price, 2 x 250Gb drives sound much better to me than a single or 2 x 74Gb drives... Very disappointed in the drive to be honest...
 
did you not notice that your samsung has an access time of 15.8ms and the raptor is 8.1ms?

also the average transfer speed is only about 4mb difference too.....if you raid them you will see this go up to about 75-80mb and about a 10-15mb increase in average transfer speeds.

Think you need to look at the figures before suggesting to people that raptors aren't quick!
 
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Reality Bites said:
did you not notice that your samsung has an access time of 15.8ms and the raptor is 8.1ms?

also the average transfer speed is only about 4mb difference too.....if you raid them you will see this go up to about 75-80mb and about a 10-15mb increase in average transfer speeds.

Think you need to look at the figures before suggesting to people that raptors aren't quick!
Click to expand...

Ok, but I'm talking for the price of them they arent that quick. If I raid'ed the Samsung drives, I would have so much more space and it would be just as quick (maybe a little slower)..

I dont think I'd even touch the 150Gb Raptors either because I believe personally they are just over priced for the speed and storage space.. I'd rather buy a few 80/120/160Gb drives and raid them that way.. Much cheaper. Might not have 100% of the speed that the raptors do, but for the price, you cares?? :)

Oh and in the real world performance, I notice NO difference at all... I actually think the Samsung appears faster... The couple of tests I've done with the Raptor a few times, I've had results in PC Mark 05 of 0.004Mb/sec.. Not good...
 
just think you need to know more of the facts before recommending things. You stated one thing and then showed pefrormance graphs contradicting it.

The argument about whether the raptors are worth it has been going on for years, but until you have a couple in raid, you'll never know!

my 2 74gb raptors will average around 75-80mb's......you'll struggle to find a single disk or even a set of non raptors which will compete. I know some of the 7200.10 disks have come very close and even beaten the older raptors but WD have brought out newer raptors since then.
 
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