SATA 2 speeds?

Buffalo2102 · 25 Jan 2007 at 16:26

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.....

Buffalo2102 · 25 Jan 2007 at 17:11

Thanks for that but I have checked for jumpers and there are none installed.

Buffalo2102 · 25 Jan 2007 at 17:26

joeyjojo said:
If it's not a jumper you will need a samsung utility disc of some sort.

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.

Buffalo2102 · 25 Jan 2007 at 18:22

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.

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......