Just upgraded not impressed

[shadowhawk2020]

I just upgraded from an Opteron 145 to a Q6600. I do a lot of video converting, and that impressed me. It went from 1:40 to 25min. However running repairs on quick pars was not that impressive 8 min to repair to 6. It is better but not great.

I am using an old 80gb IDE hard drive. I am have a new sata dive I was going to use as storage.


2 questions:

1. Would using the sata drive help the speed THAT much?

2. What extra steps do I have to do to make a sata drive my Windows boot disk?



Oh, I run windows XP, 4 gb G.skill Ram, Gigabyte Mobo, sata dvd-rom, q6600.

Thanks,
Shadow

 

[jgigz]

1. You should see (I think anyways) a decent performance improvement going to SATA (1.5 or 3.0) from IDE. Not 100% sure but I think most IDE drivers were 5200RPMs compared to 7200 (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) + the increased transfer speeds of the SATA bus. Not sure how much this would help with encoding and what not, but it definitely won't hurt.

2. You could just (re?)format the drive (not sure if the drive is already in use or not) and have the PATA drive as a slave then manually copy over your files etc, use that drive as storage. Or you could check out the Acronis Migrate Easy (not sure if it supports dissimilar disk transfers, IE going from 2 different sized drives etc.) which can image your hard drive for you and set everything up on the new drive, then you can format the PATA drive and keep it around for extra storage or what not.

Edit: You can get a 15 day trial or something along those lines for the Acronis software, I'm not recommending you buy it up front without have using it.

 

[shadowhawk2020]

I am going to give Acronis a shot ( I have true image already and believe that has a mitigration feature...) I don't know how IDE to SATA is going to be, but it won't hurt to try...

 

[0roo0roo]

par is pretty drive dependent. i remember fiddling with pars and running a video.....it didn't make much difference in speed when i upped processor usage. quickpars got that mb/s thing when its running. its pretty much slow as your drive is with todays processors. only generating par is faster on a dualcore+
i use command line par2 that has multicore support..its fast

 

[YANIV]

jgigz.. yes u are wrong.. IDE drives run at 7200 RPM too.. notebook drives are the ones usually at 5400 RPM (not 5200) ... having said that..

shadowhawk2020 - the performance increase you have noted is a really good change. if im not mistaken.. ur sayihg video encoding is good but its not showing much improvement in the other softwares... since this is a quad core system. have u seen if quick par is optimized for quad core processors.. ?

yes btw sata does speed up things... sata 1 - 1.5 Gb/S bandwidth and sata2 - 3 Gb/s (real speeds 150 Mb/S and 350 MB/s respectively)

also u need a good floppy drive and get the jmicron or whatever sata driver according to your mobo onto that floppy before u start installation.. once it starts... hit F3 and browse to ur floppy to install the drivers... without this in XP you wont be able to install windows on you sata drive..

 

[0roo0roo]

regular par is not multithreaded last i checked.
as far as i know only specially modified par2 command line uses more than one core at the moment which is why i had to resort to the command line when i had easy to use quickpar as option.

sata doesn't do that much. mainly the drive must be faster first. not many drives max out ata133 after all
ide drives have been 7200rpm for years now. i don't think they've even bothered making many if any 5400rpm drives in ide for the last 5 years atleast. those are only in laptops.
earlier raptor 10k drives were ide too. drive interface matters less than drive platter density and rpm

 

[DSF]

For what it's worth, changing to SATA doesn't by itself speed up transfers. (Or not necessarily anyhow.) Those SATA ratings are maximums, not guarantees. I don't think there are any consumer class drives that max out SATA 1.5, and certainly none that come close to the maximum bandwidth of SATA II.

As far as using a floppy drive, I wouldn't bother. Slipstream Service Pack 2 into an XP install disk (or just use one that already includes SP2 if you have that available) and you won't need to worry about using a floppy to install the drivers.

To answer your original question, newer drives are noticeably faster than older drives, regardless of whether or not they use the SATA interface. Which new drive did you buy?

 

[jgigz]

Originally posted by: YANIV
jgigz.. yes u are wrong.. IDE drives run at 7200 RPM too.. notebook drives are the ones usually at 5400 RPM (not 5200) ... having said that..

shadowhawk2020 - the performance increase you have noted is a really good change. if im not mistaken.. ur sayihg video encoding is good but its not showing much improvement in the other softwares... since this is a quad core system. have u seen if quick par is optimized for quad core processors.. ?

yes btw sata does speed up things... sata 1 - 1.5 Gb/S bandwidth and sata2 - 3 Gb/s (real speeds 150 Mb/S and 350 MB/s respectively)

also u need a good floppy drive and get the jmicron or whatever sata driver according to your mobo onto that floppy before u start installation.. once it starts... hit F3 and browse to ur floppy to install the drivers... without this in XP you wont be able to install windows on you sata drive..

Yeah I realized I had the RPM's wrong after I posted, but didn't have time to edit once I noticed it, got caught up with work. I didn't say that all IDE drives run @ 5400, but some of the do(again correct me if I'm wrong) depending on the age?

 

[shadowhawk2020]

I do not have a floppy drive... What other way is there to get the drivers loaded? Is true image a bad idea?

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: shadowhawk2020
I do not have a floppy drive... What other way is there to get the drivers loaded? Is true image a bad idea?

In my earlier post I recommended slipstreaming Service Pack 2 into a Windows XP install disc. (I assume you're using XP.)

Google "slipstream XP" and you'll get plenty of hits with good information on how to do so. There are a number of steps, but it's a pretty easy process.

 

[shadowhawk2020]

Also, I guess not impressed is not the thing to say. I am impressed with the speed increase of encoding. The par thing dissapointed me a little, I will try the other programs. The Hard (ide) is at least 6 years old. It is probably 5400 RPM. I am not sure about the SATA, but will have to check when I get home.

I hope Acronis works, there will be no harm in me trying. The drive is next to empty, and I still will have the ide drive if it fails. How easy or hard will it be to format the sata drive if Acronis fails?

 

[DSF]

It's easy to format a drive. Honestly, I would get rid of a six year old drive anyway. It's getting to the point now that's it's more and more likely to fail.

There's no guarantee that it will fail this year or even in two years, but the chance is much greater now than it was two or three years ago.

 

[jgigz]

You shouldn't have any issues formating the drive. I just did a fresh install of XP last week with my SATA drive and did not have to slipstream SP2 into the install, though I have had instances where the drivers needed to be installed. Only one way to find out really.

 

[shadowhawk2020]

Great! Thank you for all the advice. I will Google slipstream when I get home. I may try acronis and hope for the best...

 

[0roo0roo]

http://www.anandtech.com/stora...howdoc.aspx?i=3311&p=5

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: shadowhawk2020
Also, I guess not impressed is not the thing to say. I am impressed with the speed increase of encoding. The par thing dissapointed me a little, I will try the other programs. The Hard (ide) is at least 6 years old. It is probably 5400 RPM. I am not sure about the SATA, but will have to check when I get home.

I hope Acronis works, there will be no harm in me trying. The drive is next to empty, and I still will have the ide drive if it fails. How easy or hard will it be to format the sata drive if Acronis fails?

ok 5 years is a long time. and 5400rpm is bad. each increase in platter density even for a cheap drive speeds up transfers. so a 5 year old drive is dog slow compared to a new drive.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: jgigz
I didn't say that all IDE drives run @ 5400, but some of the do(again correct me if I'm wrong) depending on the age?

It depends more on design than age. Right now you can get 5400RPM SATA drives - WD "Green" series. I bought my first 7200RPM drives before SATA came out, way back with some IBM Deathstar drives around 14GB or so. That was... oh... an eon ago.

Originally posted by: shadowhawk2020
Also, I guess not impressed is not the thing to say. I am impressed with the speed increase of encoding. The par thing dissapointed me a little

Basically you've removed the CPU limitation. If everything you did was completely CPU dependant, then you'd see more of an overall performance jump. Not only are you limited by your slowest component, but also some things just really won't get a huge amount faster no matter how much you upgrade (such as Windows boot/shutdown times).

 

[shadowhawk2020]

Well the transfer was painless, it worked without the Windows disk... I do see some improvement in spped when using the SATA Hard Drve. I also have a Windows disk now with SP2 on it

Once I got everything working and installed a few games I must say I am more than impressed. Now for the overclocking.
Thanks again for the help.

 

[YANIV]

hey any time.. glad to see ur happy with the results..