Got USB2.0 on a KT333 or KT266A board? Share your HDD benchmarks with USB2.0 enabled versus disabled!

[mechBgon]

I got an A7V333-RAID recently, and set it up with a SCSI controller and a new Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP. However, the SCSI controller was being bottlenecked to just 47Mb/sec total throughput, whether from one hard drive or two.

To make a long story short, disabling onboard USB 2.0 boosted my SCSI card's transfer rates by 20Mb/second (still not quite what I was hoping, but better). Any IDE owners want to follow up on this with some quick benchmarks with USB 2.0 enabled versus disabled? I'm thinking the USB 2.0 controller is sucking down a bunch of PCI bandwidth or something.

 

[onelin]

wow, that's a big diff. my A7V333 and AthXP1900+ are due in tomorrow, I may not get to set it up by Friday but I will definitely post some benchmarks for ya. for HDD benchmarks I won't worry about heat, but the 2nd order arrives thursday morning I think with my AS3 and other stuff like the bios savior... I have a maxtor 7200rpm 80gb drive, should be interesting.

any programs you want me to use in particular? I think I have a limited ver of HD Tach lying around that I could use for the test, off a recent reformat so shouldn't have issues.

 

[mechBgon]

Yeah, I was thinking HDTach (too bad the freeware version doesn't run on Win2k ) or maybe SiSoft Sandra, or others too... just curious if USB 2.0 puts a heavy load on the PCI bus and impacts performance. It could be some kind of wacky SCSI-related conflict. Anyway, looking forward to your findings.

 

[OracleMan]

sound familiar! One day I went to CompUSA and there was one display custom-made pc for pc game. It has Athlon XP 1500+, 256MB, 30GB EIDE, GeForce3. I navigated through this pc so flawlessly and pretty damn fast.

Compare this to my rigs. I have Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB DDR333, SCSI160 10K RPM, 32MB ATI. Guest which is faster? right! the compusa one! Some time when I launch IE, it took about 8secs.

Maybe because of the USB 2.0 or other onboard peripherals. I'm gonna disable the USB2.0 and see if any difference.

 

[onelin]

oracleman... quite interesting believable... but weird. know what tho? probably just not very fragmented, and IE isn't a very good comparison. I've been 99% converted to Opera 6.0x for a month or two now and it is sooo much nicer even in WinXP. only thing I need IE for is windows update (rarely, of course) best $20 I've spent in a while. (I'm a student so it's slightly cheaper...but still.)

edit:
PSU predicament...300W not nearly enough so I'm not risking it once I realized (even though it's an Antec) ...should have a new one tomorrow morning or afternoon/early evening...if it's still raining here I have the time. will also check with a friend who runs 15krpm SCSI, but that's an A7V266 and probably no USB 2.0

 

[mechBgon]

I got my paws on another A7V333-R system with a Western Digital 80Gb Special Edition IDE hard drive and it shows the same results in HD Tach with USB 2.0 enabled or disabled. Maybe it's a SCSI problem I'm facing... Anyone else got some input to share?