LarryAllen Posted March 20, 2006 Share Posted March 20, 2006 I have a MSI K8N Neo4 motherboard with 4 SATA connections. I have a WD120 IDE as a boot drive and a WD80 SATA for storage. Both drives are functioning but the SATA drive (SATA pin3 on mobo) is really slow (benchmarked at less than the IDE). I went to System Info and both of these drives are seen as IDE devices; I believe the SATA should be picked up as a SCSI. When I built this system I did not install any drivers for either SATA or RAID. Still don’t want RAID but would like to think that the SATA would benefit from the driver. Have been told that no drivers are req’d but can’t believe this. I have a floppy with the SATA/RAID drivers on it but am unsure how to proceed as system is up and running. Have heard things re: F6 but don’t know what this means as I’ve seen it used in context of a new Windows install prompt. Can anybody help? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dford Posted March 21, 2006 Share Posted March 21, 2006 SATA/150 First-generation Serial ATA interfaces, also known as SATA/150, run at 1.5 gigahertz. This results in an actual data transfer rate of 1.2 gigabits per second (Gbit/s), or 150 megabytes per second. This transfer rate is only slightly higher than that provided by the fastest Parallel ATA mode, Ultra ATA at 133 MB/second (UDMA/133). SATA/300 has a maximum throughput of 300 MB/s. This increased data rate specification is very widely referred to as “Serial ATA II” (“SATA II”)SATA 300 is backwards-compatible with SATA 150 devices, meaning you can plug older SATA 150 hardware into newer SATA 300 ports (and vice versa). If you have a SATA II drive I would recommend that you use that as your boot drive and the PATA as your storage drive.In BIOS you should have the option to set the SATA drive as RAID, SATA or AHCI, you can set it to RAID and have the RAID utility set it up as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). If you install windows on the JBOD Drive you will need to press F6 at the beginning of your XP Installation (Watch the bottom of the Blue screen when you boot up your Windows Installation CD you will see the F6 prompt) You will need to have your RAID Driver on a diskette.If you do not set up the BIOS for a RAID Drive and just set it to SATA you do not need to specify or press F6 to load a driver for it. If it is SATA II you should notice a difference in the speed. If it is SATA 1 ... you will not notice muchof a difference at all. If your BIOS supports loading the SATA driver as AHCI you will need to load the Driver for this as well Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LLXX Posted March 21, 2006 Share Posted March 21, 2006 Certain mobos hide the fact that it's a SATA and present the drive to the software as an ATA133.Check to make sure DMA is enabled in the device properties for your SATA drive.Also, what are the speeds you're getting from the SATA drive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LarryAllen Posted March 21, 2006 Author Share Posted March 21, 2006 Many thanks to you both! I really do not want to set the SATA drive up all over again especially if results are apt to be insignificant; however, I used HD Tune to look at the SATA drive and came out with the following results: Transfer rate - Min 32.8 mb/sec, Max 56.4 mb/sec, Average 49.4 mb/sec; access time 13.8 ms; Burst rate 98.3 mb/sec w/6.6% CPU useage. These all seem to be low numbers to me, the larger 120gb IDE posted Transfer rate Min 33.9 mb/sec, Max 58.0 mb/sec; Average 50.1 mb/sec with access of 12.8ms and a burst rate of 81.5mb/sec w/CPU 8.3%. Seems to me that the IDE has the advantage given that its 50% larger in size and is still quicker than the SATA. That's why I believe something's not Kosher. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LLXX Posted March 22, 2006 Share Posted March 22, 2006 You are comparing drives of different sizes; that is of course going to give different results. The 120Gb probably has a higher angular track density on the platters so it can give a slightly higher sustained transfer rate than the 80Gb. However, in your burst speeds the SATA clearly has the advantage, which is to be expected given the faster maximum speed of the interface.But, both of these drives cannot saturate an ATA nor a SATA interface, so the difference is not large. Everything looks quite normal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apokalips Posted March 22, 2006 Share Posted March 22, 2006 err same thing happend to me.. Sata is detected by XP as ATA how can i repair this without re-installing windows?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LLXX Posted March 23, 2006 Share Posted March 23, 2006 err same thing happend to me.. Sata is detected by XP as ATA how can i repair this without re-installing windows?? Read my previous posts. If the drive works fine there's nothing wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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