[lug] 1T + SATA 300 performance

[karl horlen]

I finally purchased a combo pci promise SATA II 300
and a Seagate 1T 32MB cache HD to match based upon two
recent threads I posted here.  I've successfully
installed them both in an existing XP P4 2.2G system
which is 5 years old and upgraded to the recent
controller driver.

My major reason for the upgrade to SATA on an older
system was capacity. This definitely solves that
problem and the setup works fine as is.

However, I'm disappointed with the disk / transfer
performance.  A dup of 232G of data on an existing
internal ATA drive attached to primary mobo ide
controller to a 500G fresh partition on a new 1T
attached to a separate SATA 3G controller takes 2
HOURS.  That seems to be no faster than it was copying
to an external USB 2.0 ATA drive.  Or at least it
seems like it.

Shouldn't it be faster than this even if it was
operating at 1.5G / sec?  Anybody have thoughts?

- Is the older pci bus itself the bottleneck?  

I imagine it doesn't matter if the pipeline between
the controller and the drive is 3G because the
pipeline to the controller itself is going to be the
limiting factor.  So how do I find out the speed /
transfer rate of my older pci bus?

And just so my expectations are correct, I'm using my
own very simplified formula to estimate an expected
232G transfer time.  

232GB / 1.5 Gb per sec = 155 seconds to complete xfer
bits

155 seconds * 8 (rough bit to byte factor) = 1237
seconds to complete as bytes

1237 / 60 secs per minute = 21 minutes to complete
232GB job at SATA 1.5Gb speed.  Meaning it should be
even faster if at 3G speed!

Is this semi accurate?

- Any good spyware freeware disk benchmarking tools
for XP?

- Any drive settings that need to be tweeked? 

When i go into the device mgr to inspect the disk
props checkboxes to DISable 'tagged queuing' and
DISable 'synchronous transfer' are both UNenabled.

Not sure if this matters, but right clicking the drive
to bring up props general tab reveals that I'm NOT
compressing drive but "Allow Indexing Service to index
this disk for fast file searching" IS ENABLED.

When I go into the controller props, nothing is really
available to change.

Thanks




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