ATA33+ is bullsh*t for single hd comps?

[link26]

I'm using an Abit TH7ii mobo hooked up with a maxtor 80gb 7200 fluidbearing hard drive. The mobo is ATA100 capable.

I only have one hard drive in this computer.

I turn on Serv-U and login to 127.0.0.1 and do a local transfer on my hard drive. It starts out at 13 MB/s....... then slowly decreases to 6 MB/s in the end. Meanwhile, the hd is chugging like mad trying to copy the 400MB file i'm copying over.

My hd is only half filled at most, so it shouldn't be slow due to overfilling.

What exactly is the ATA33 spec?..... that it should hit a maximum of 33 MB/s right? But it can never hit that speed for reasons that I've never understood....

What is the bottleneck in my computer?

 

[narzy]

FYI the BS word (well more the S word then the B word but put together the entire word) is a no no in your thread title.

welcome to AT.

 

[ChrisIsBored]

Hmmmm... well since you're using Serv-U you're not technically going straight hdd to hdd copy I think.... You're pretty much FTPing yourself which would mean the NIC is what's holding you back... right?

 

[link26]

Originally posted by: chrisisbored
Hmmmm... well since you're using Serv-U you're not technically going straight hdd to hdd copy I think.... You're pretty much FTPing yourself which would mean the NIC is what's holding you back... right?

You don't need an NIC card to do local ftp transfers. You don't even need to be online to login to the 127.0.0.1 local ip.

So yes, the file transfer is a hd copy. The only reason I used an ftp client to copy the big file is that it tells me the transfer rate.

Do people get sustained transfer rates above a measly 13 MB/s for a 400MB file on a single hard drive? Is it normal or not?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

it could be anything. try copying files the "regular way" or try a benchmarking program.

it should get around 20-40MB/s sustained transfer. also keep in mind alot of your hard drive access is not sustained but in short bursts where the cache plays a role, and that's where ata(33|66|100|133) becomes a bottleneck.

buy a 15k rpm seagate cheetah

edit: oh you are reading and writing to the same drive..that probably explains it.

 

[Accord99]

The latest 7200 rpm hard drives all have maximum disk transfer rates (read) of over +40MB/s and averages of well over 30MB/s. However, since you're reading and writing to the same hard drive, you're going to see much lower speeds because the hard drive has to read, then spend some ms seeking to free space to write then seeking back to the file to read and so on. You'll get much closer to the maximum performance of a hard drive if you had a second hard drive and did disk-to-disk transfers.

 

[link26]

Well according to this HDtach benchmark I just did....... the read speeds seem to be fine.
It looks like only the write speeds are slow. Of course, I can't do a write test with hdtach because it would require destroying all my partitions.

I copied the regular way, and I was able to copy a 360MB file in ~34 seconds...... which still comes out to about 10 MB/s average, and that number isn't too impressive to me.

 

[link26]

Originally posted by: Accord99
The latest 7200 rpm hard drives all have maximum disk transfer rates (read) of over +40MB/s and averages of well over 30MB/s. However, since you're reading and writing to the same hard drive, you're going to see much lower speeds because the hard drive has to read, then spend some ms seeking to free space to write then seeking back to the file to read and so on. You'll get much closer to the maximum performance of a hard drive if you had a second hard drive and did disk-to-disk transfers.

ahh....... that makes sense now. I like that explanation.