Is this a slow HDD access time for Vista?

[ZappDogg]

I've got Vista Ultimate running on a SATA II 3gb/s Seagate 320gb 7200.10 drive with 16 megs of cache. This is my first SATA drive, so maybe I'm just confused, but when I right click the drive in Device Manager, and do a read speed test, I consistently get about 55mb/s.

Is this consistent with other's results, or is there something I'm missing here? I know that the theoretical limit is 3gb/s, but still, 50 seems awfully slow. I know for a fact that SATA II is enable, Vista is saying so on the test menu.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

The theoretical output of a sata ii drive is 3gb/s. No consumer level hard drives even approach this output, so it's really just a marketing gimmick. 55mb/s is fine.

 

[zephyrprime]

don't confuse your bits and bytes. That's 55MB/s. Not 55Mb/s. So 55MB/s is 440Mb/s. That's normal for a drive nowadays.

Drives are never able to reach the speeds offered by their interfaces. However, buffered reads and writes can for short periods of time.

The 3gb/s speed is *not* just a marketing gimmick. The speed is needed for RAID arrays and for future growth. And as I said, it does offer a small benefit for the cached reads & writes.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
don't confuse your bits and bytes. That's 55MB/s. Not 55Mb/s. So 55MB/s is 440Mb/s. That's normal for a drive nowadays.

Drives are never able to reach the speeds offered by their interfaces. However, buffered reads and writes can for short periods of time.

The 3gb/s speed is *not* just a marketing gimmick. The speed is needed for RAID arrays and for future growth. And as I said, it does offer a small benefit for the cached reads & writes.

Right, sorry, forgot about raid arrays which actually can take advantage of the larger bandwidth. As for the future growth part... I can't imagine existing drive technology is going to be sustainably outputting anything near 3gb/s anytime soon - though any information to the contrary would be welcomed by me!

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
The 3gb/s speed is *not* just a marketing gimmick. The speed is needed for RAID arrays and for future growth. And as I said, it does offer a small benefit for the cached reads & writes.

3 Gb/s drive interface speed in the hands of nearly everyone is just a marketing gimmick. A demonstration is called for if a claim is being made that the interface speed alone makes a significant difference in a real application.

RAID arrays work just fine with 1.5 Gb/s interface speed, because this is per drive, not aggregate, which typically uses an entirely different interface -- PCIe or PCI-X, etc..

There is an exception for SATA port multipliers, but that's a special case with its own issues and requirements, and non-port multiplier systems can match or exceed their performance.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I thought that some standard raid arrays actually exceed the 1.5gb/s sata 1 bandwidth? Is this not the case?

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Gigantopithecus
I thought that some standard raid arrays actually exceed the 1.5gb/s sata 1 bandwidth? Is this not the case?

RAID arrays can exceed 1.5 Gb/s, however, they don't need each drive's interface to be > 1.5 Gb/s to do so.

It looks like this:

PC <---controller interface---> RAID controller <---SATA interfaces---> {SATA drive 1, drive 2, ... drive n}

Only the controller interface needs to be > 1.5 Gb/s for this. Each drive by itself will not sustain transfers faster than 1.5 Gb/s -- it can't. All the drives together, talking to the RAID controller through separate (SATA) links, can sustain more than 1.5 Gb/s provided that the RAID controller can do that and its interface is not for example standard PCI which is slower than this limit.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: ZappDogg
I've got Vista Ultimate running on a SATA II 3gb/s Seagate 320gb 7200.10 drive with 16 megs of cache. This is my first SATA drive, so maybe I'm just confused, but when I right click the drive in Device Manager, and do a read speed test, I consistently get about 55mb/s.

55 MB/s is a bit slow for this sort of drive, but the results sometimes vary according to the measurement technique. Try HDTach for prettier graphics and a more commonly-used tool if you want.

The following shows a graph for a 320 GB 7200.10 PATA drive (in blue), which averages 65.6 MB/s (> 55 MB/s).

http://i89.photobucket.com/alb...s-Pata-Diff-drives.png

The drive shown in red has a SATA interface, and is slower in the sequential read speed test.

 

[ZappDogg]

I just ran this utility on both physical drives (both Seagate 320gb 7200.10), and both return about a 66 MB/s average. But look at the weird dropoffs on the windows drive: http://i17.tinypic.com/4lihaxc.jpg

Any clue what that could mean? The backup drive is much more steady in regards to variations. The above drive is formated into two 150gb partitions, both with different sized clusters, so I don't know if that makes a difference.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

The free HDTUNE will generally yield a "prettier" graph. Defrag the drive and turn off AV scanning when you run the test. The average speed will still be around 66MB/s

 

[ZappDogg]

HDTUNE gave the same results, about 60MB/s average, but the windows drive still had sharp dropoffs of about 1.5MB/s.

 

[ZappDogg]

Any thoughts on what might cause those dropoffs?

 

[Maffer]

Let's bump this thread a bit. I'm suffering from the exact same dropoffs with my Seagate SATA2 7200.10 250GB drive. I got Vista Ultimate 64-bit installed on this drive and HDD access speed & time is totally random. Usually HDTach gives same kind of graph like ZappDogg linked above including sharp dropoffs and average read speed is 55-60MB/s. It gets even more weird, sometimes situation goes like this: http://www.students.tut.fi/~koski7/pix/hdd_bench.png

Note the access time which is totally screwed. Also Vista experience index is showing HDD index of 4.1 instead of 5.7 which was the score 1.5 months ago when I installed Vista. Following changes have happened after Vista install which may have caused a problem:

1) I noticed IDE mode was Legacy IDE in BIOS, so I made some tricks and got ACHI working in Vista with no evident problems. Also installed Intel Matrix Storage drivers at this point. No problems, HDD index stays at 5.7. HDD access noise dropped somewhat with AHCI operation. However, I was not able to set write back caching or the other option (dun remember what it was) anymore in device manager for the drive. Event viewer says driver does not allow it (iastor.sys). MS' own ACHI SATA driver allows those options and shows drive working in UDMA6 mode instead of UDMA5 with Intel Matrix driver installed.

2) I noticed the drive still had 1.5Gb/s jumper limiter attached. I removed it. No problems in Vista, or at least I didn't notice anything drastical by the time. Matrix Storage console shows SATA2 operation as it should.

3) I installed 8800GTX to replace the GTS I had. At this point Vista asked me to refresh experience index which I did and HDD score was way off it should be. I had not paid much attention to index for a long time due to 4GB of memory helping lots in avoiding massive HDD usage and system was generally running fine.

Now I'm a bit clueless what is wrong in my system. I'm not very fond of reformatting my HDD for OS reinstall either. Seatools does not give any errors with long test. Drive is being properly cooled with temps varying in 36-40 Celcius range. Drive is attached to SATA1 port (Intel ICH7). I also have another Seagate PATA drive in my system which gives very nice consistent results with no weird dropoffs in HDtach whatsover.

 

[zephyrprime]

Go into control panel and look under the properties of your drive. Turn on "enable advanced performance".

 

[Maffer]

I have done that enough times already and the option just won't stay on. Intel Matrix Strorage drivers do not seem to allow it at all.