SATA II drives operation

davethe11

davethe11

davethe11

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hi there

i've got an Asus p5k-e wifi board and have two SATA II hdds plugged in. I dont want to raid them, but I want to make sure I am getting the max bandwidth (upto 3GB per sec) - the bios says they are currently in IDE mode (and therefore parallel) but I see no option for serial mode? The other two options are raid and AHCI, how do I set my sata drives so they are benefitting from the SATA II speed (do I have to create a raid array with only one disk on it?).

cheers
dave
 
IDE does not mean parallel. IDE means Integrated Drive Electronics. It's the normal, non-RAID, operation mode. AHCI would be better as it allows for some fancier features such as NCQ, but probably isn't worth the hassle in your situation since you are already getting full speed operation.
 
Nope, you shouldn't need to Raid them. The difference in speed will be negligible between SATA 150MB/s and 300MB/s but normally they will auto-negotiate the speed but it does partly depend on the hard drives themselves as some manufacturers set them automatically to SATA 150MB/s for maximum compatability.

//edit, gah everywhere I go Billy seems to be beating me today. :D
 
thanks honouraries :)

but the mobo manual says "If you want to use the Serial ATA hard drives as Parallel ATA physical storage devices, keep the default setting (IDE)"

any thoughts on this?
 
As far as I am aware that is just a legacy setting to ensure compatability since Windows XP doesn't automatically recognise SATA hard drives (it was programmed years before SATA came around) so most motherboards 'fool' Windows into recognising the SATA drives as ordinary IDE/PATA devices. It shouldn't make any difference to the speed.
 
I used Seagate 750Gb and 500GB hard drive with SATA-II as SATA-150 usual default but Ive removed the block from the back of HDD to enabled as SATA2-300
 
semi-pro waster said:
As far as I am aware that is just a legacy setting to ensure compatability since Windows XP doesn't automatically recognise SATA hard drives (it was programmed years before SATA came around) so most motherboards 'fool' Windows into recognising the SATA drives as ordinary IDE/PATA devices. It shouldn't make any difference to the speed.
Click to expand...

Exactly, it's like IDE emulation. For best performance you should really run in native SATA mode (AHCI) but this would require you too slipstream the SATA controller drivers into your XP disc or F6 with the drivers on a floppy during XP setup.
The amount of performace increase will depend on both the SATA controller and HD used.
 
thanks for all the help, I did remove the block/jumper from the drive for 300GBPS operation when I installed the drive, but didnt really know how to verify that the drive was operating at this speed. When I installed windows I didnt have the drivers at hand so could not install them unfortunatly (previous mobos ive had had a floppy with "scsi raid drivers" on them) - can I install the drivers with xp already installed by uninstalling the drives in device manager then installing the correct drivers? Or can you only install the drivers when installing windows?
 
You could install the drivers if you want but it probably won't make all that much difference to the speed, I'm not sure that you could uninstall the drives first though, I'd just install the drivers over the top.
 
thanks for the advice, would you be kind enough to break down the bandwidth differences between IDE, SATA and SATA II, and could you explain why I would not notice any major difference if my hdds were using their full SATA II bandwidth potential? It just seems to me that a hdd operating at 3 Gbits/sec (SATA II) would be significantly faster than a hdd operating at 1.5 Gbits/sec (SATA I).
 
Long story short it refers to the max (burst) data speed and even the fastest ordinary hard drives (7200rpm as the most common) will only reach an average of up to 70-80MB/s sustained unless put into a Raid array. This is below what even PATA drives are capable of (100MB/s or 133MB/s depending on the drive), below the original SATA specification (150MB/s) and at that point well below the revised SATA specification which allows up to 300MB/s.

The interface isn't massively important in speed terms compared to the data density and general advances in drive technology.

Hopefully that clears it up a bit but if not I'll try to rephrase. :)
 
semi-pro waster said:
Hopefully that clears it up a bit but if not I'll try to rephrase. :)
Click to expand...

no thats excellent, thanks for clearing that up for me. It does leave me with one question though, why introduce SATA II or even SATA when the drive electronics cannot reach this speed anyway? (ok, perhpas I havnt fully grasped this yet!)
 
If you are of a cynical pursuasion it is a case of Emporers New Clothes syndrome, give it a new title and people will buy it. However if you are feeling less hard-bitten it makes sense to build capacity into the system because occasionally the burst speed will be reached and with solid state hard drives there is certainly potential for the 100MB/s sustained threshold to be breached albeit perhaps not just yet.
 
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