promise ata 100

[DinTek]

Here is one for everyone.

I am running an AMD 750 athlon T-bird
on an ASUS A7V mother board. I have a quantum fireball -LM 7200 rmp HD hooked up to the ATA100 connector on the board. The HD is set to CABLE SELECT the manufacture spec for use of ATA 100

I am running WIN 2000 PRO with serivce pack 1 installed.

The WIN 2000 driver for the promise ATA/100 installed fine and every thing works great!

winbench reports that the HD has an access time of 8.81 ms and an average transfer rate of 26900 thousand bytes/sec

Then I hook up the 80 pin connector from the hard drive to the plain IDE connector on the Mother board.

winbench reports that the HD has an access time of 8.79 ms and the exact same transfer rate of 26900 thousand bytes/sec

Oh yes one other thing with ATA100 enabled in bios as well as under win 2000 device manager it takes 1 min and 13 seconds to boot up. While with ata 100 disabled in bios and under win 2000 it takes 34 seconds.

If any one knows how to get a better transfer rate with this HD let me know. The manufacturer says its capable of ATA66 (66 megs per second I would assume)

Thanks,

DinTek.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

The figure of 66 MB/sec is a potential burst rate, not sustained transfer. The figure you are getting from Winbench, I would suspect, is for sustained. 26900 MB/sec is a fantastic score - I've seen ATA100 drives that rate well under 30000 MB/sec, and UDMA33 drives generally deliver 10-12000 at the fastest.

Even the fastest SCSI drives do not deliver the full 160MB/sec, because every disk is limited by the access/seek time. Unless all the files are sequential, the figures reported by benchmarking tools are always going to be lower than the poential.

I would *guess* that your bootup time is slowed dwon by the card initialising. The same sort of thing happends with SCSI as the card loads its BIOS and checks the drive configuration.

I hope this helps.

 

[DinTek]

Well thank you for your response,

I guess it is quite good then. Interesting that on ATA 100 or on plain IDE the HD preforms the same. I assumed that IDE was slower on UDMA4 then on ata 100.

None the less if 26.9 mb/sec is what I am stuck with that is good enough. just wanted to know if there was anyway to tweak it faster.

Thanks,

DinTek.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Hmm. I would have thought that the ATA100 controller would have provided better performance than a standard IDE controller. Your assumption is correct, an ATA100 bus has more bandwidth than a UDMA4 bus.

Check out Quantum's white paper (you'll notice that nowhere does it refer to _sustained_ data transfer rates, although burst rates of 56Mb/sec are quoted for ATA66.

http://www.quantum.com/src/whitepapers/wp_ultraata100.htm

Here's the announcement mentioned in this white paper:

http://dgl.com/itinfo/2000/it000606.html

or there's this development specification, if you really want to get the low-down

http://www.quantum.com/src/whitepapers/wp_ultraata100_dvlpmt.htm

It's interesting that IBM quote 37MB/sec for their Deskstar product, which is held by many to be the best ATA 100 drive around.

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/desk/ds75gxp.htm

This link is very interesting reading

http://www.storagereview.com/welcom...om/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/unstdUltra66.html

I hope this information is useful

 

[DinTek]

Hello,

Thanks for all the usefull information. I recentely upgraded my promise drivers to build 160. Windows 2000 works like a charm. Boot fast again even with the ata100 loaded.

I ran HD Tach to see what my burst speeds were like.

With Promise ATA enabled I had 57.6mb/s burst

With plain IDE UDMA4 hooked up it was around 56 not sure why it is so close.

IT seems no matter what I get around the exact preformance with both settings.

Regardless I feel as though I should leave it ATA enabled it seems like the right choice, especially now that windows boot times are the same.

Thanks,

Sean.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

That last article I posted might give some clues - it seems to me that the author is saying that there's a lot of hype surrounding this new technology and that performance is not what the manufacturers promise!

I would look to parallels with the new Intel Pentium 4 chips, which have been proven by many respected reviewers such as

http://www.tomshardware.com

to be slower than either their Pentium III counterparts or AMD Athlon rivals.

The reason for this would appear to be that there is little software available to take advantage of the new technology, and I would suspect the same is true of the ATA66/100 formats.

So you are right to buy into the technology - I would think that in the longer term you are likely to benefit!

Have you tried running Sandra or Winbench? There are also some good sites which feature articles on performance enhancements, such as

http://www.arstechnica.com

Good Luck!