SATA 2 / SATA II Speed Test - How do I know it's working?

[philip5660]

I have just built a machine with an Asrock 939 Dual SATA2 motherboard and I am using a Samsung HD080HJ 80GB SATA 2 for my main C drive and a Maxtor 120 GB IDE drive for secondary storage.
After installing XP and all the drivers from the Asrock website I just wasn't convinced that the SATA 2 was any faster then my old (IDE) setup. My BIOS is verison 1.6 (latest from website).
I am starting again from scratch (xp install running as we speak) as I want to be sure that I am doing everything correctly and installing the correct drivers.
Has anyone got any suggestions - is there a good utility for comparing the speed of my SATA 2 to other devices?

Thanks

 

[stevty2889]

HDtach is a good hard drive benchmarking program. But over all, there isn't going to be a huge differance in performance anyway. Slightly higher burst rate, but the sustained rate won't be much higher, so there isn't going to be any huge noticable differance.

 

[philip5660]

Thank you,

I'll give that wee utility a shot - There's possibly nothing really wrong but i just want to be sure i'm getting value for £££££!!

Philip

 

[deathwalker]

Originally posted by: stevty2889
HDtach is a good hard drive benchmarking program. But over all, there isn't going to be a huge differance in performance anyway. Slightly higher burst rate, but the sustained rate won't be much higher, so there isn't going to be any huge noticable differance.

I agree...I have a SATA drive with 16mb buffer and I can tell no difference in its performance than the 7200rpm IDE drive it replaced.

 

[DBSX]

After installing XP and all the drivers from the Asrock website I just wasn't convinced that the SATA 2 was any faster then my old (IDE) setup. My BIOS is verison 1.6 (latest from website).

Basically that is the answer. For the most part there will be no significant increase in speed (unless you are going from a very old or slow drive). Most newer drives (PATA and SATA) are very fast, and no drive can saturate the 133MB/s bus, so going to 150 or 300 doesn't matter. Benchmarks will be faster, other things may be faster too, but really you won't notice that much difference.

\Dan

 

[Madwand1]

The "burst speed" result from HDTach will tell you whether or not the SATA II is properly configured. I also find HDTach to give higher transfer rates for some SATA II drives, but on occasion that's been so far out that I no longer regard the HDTach numbers as being reliable, particularly for high interface speeds and large buffer sizes accumulated in RAID.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1806276&enterthread=y

(Please ignore the CacheSet reference if you read it; it's not reliable for this purpose.)

 

[philip5660]

that's interesting - the fact that no drive can saturate the bus. so SATA is just a bit of a rip off really, there's nothing to be gained until the speed of the actual disc is increased. I'll not upgrade in such a hurry in the future! thanks all

 

[mircea]

Well there is the benefit of working on lower voltage and more managable cables.

 

[Madwand1]

I wish they'd done a better job on the connectors. There are reports of connectors breaking off drives, and I find mine coming loose already. Couldn't say that about any PATA connector that I've used over several years myself. Of course, nobody argues that SATA cables aren't better in theory and more manageable especially for multiple drives; my point is that maybe they could have been a bit better, and we might see increasing problems with this format with time, assuming that people change their drives around not a small fraction of how much I change my drives around (for trying out different drives, RAID configurations, etc.).

 

[philip5660]

Yes i definitely found that while working inside the machine the SATA cable was easy to knock out, poor, really really poor