Silly HDD question

I have had vista up and running for months but my score is held back by the
HDD. When I had it on a 160GB Maxtor it scored 5.2 so the advice I was
given was to go to SATA from IDE. I purchased a 500GB Hitachi SATA2 drive
but the score only improved to 5.3. After a bit of research I discovered
that the drive normally sets up at SATA1 speeds and needs to be reset using
the software provided at the Hitachi website. I did this and made a
bootable CD and used it to set the drive up at it's maximum throughput but
this made no difference. It still reads at 5.3. I put up with this until
now because I am running out of free space and need some more. Do I buy a
USB 1TB device at USB2 speeds or purchase a 1TB Samsung f1 internal drive.
Will the boot time be decreased any? I am running a Q6600 at 2.8GHz on an
ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard with 4GB of PC6400 ram.

TIA

Robin

'Dumbo' wrote:
I have had vista up and running for months but my score is held back by
the HDD. When I had it on a 160GB Maxtor it scored 5.2 so the advice I
was given was to go to SATA from IDE. I purchased a 500GB Hitachi SATA2
drive but the score only improved to 5.3. After a bit of research I
discovered that the drive normally sets up at SATA1 speeds and needs to be
reset using the software provided at the Hitachi website. I did this and
made a bootable CD and used it to set the drive up at it's maximum
throughput but this made no difference. It still reads at 5.3. I put up
with this until now because I am running out of free space and need some
more. Do I buy a USB 1TB device at USB2 speeds or purchase a 1TB Samsung
f1 internal drive.
Will the boot time be decreased any? I am running a Q6600 at 2.8GHz on an
ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard with 4GB of PC6400 ram.
_____

The Vista performance score is just about useless. It was only meant to
give a rough guide to a computer system power TWO YEARS AGO!

And yes, it is silly to worry about getting a 5.9; that is as high as the
performance scores go. For example, I get a Vista Hard Drive Performance
score of 5.8 using a single 500 GB Seagate ST350063 SATA 2 drive for the
system drive. The sustained transfer rate is measured at 81.1 MBytes per
second, and the burst rate at 144.3 MBytes per second. That's on a nVidia
680i motherboard with an E4300 @ 3 GHz and 2 GBytes of DDR2 400 memory.

Perhaps you should be getting a better rating, but the Vista performance is
no help at all in finding out WHY your rating is lower than 5.9.
Finally, you will never notice ANY difference in boot time going to a 1
TByte SATA 2 drive. With a USB 2 TByte drive you likely WILL notice an
increase in boot time; it will be slower.

The Vista Performance score is meant to give someone who knows very little
about computers a way to compare performance. It is useless for anything
else.

Phil Weldon



"Dumbo" wrote in message
...
I have had vista up and running for months but my score is held back by the
HDD. When I had it on a 160GB Maxtor it scored 5.2 so the advice I was
given was to go to SATA from IDE. I purchased a 500GB Hitachi SATA2 drive
but the score only improved to 5.3. After a bit of research I discovered
that the drive normally sets up at SATA1 speeds and needs to be reset using
the software provided at the Hitachi website. I did this and made a
bootable CD and used it to set the drive up at it's maximum throughput but
this made no difference. It still reads at 5.3. I put up with this until
now because I am running out of free space and need some more. Do I buy a
USB 1TB device at USB2 speeds or purchase a 1TB Samsung f1 internal drive.
Will the boot time be decreased any? I am running a Q6600 at 2.8GHz on an
ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard with 4GB of PC6400 ram.

TIA

Robin

Dumbo wrote:
I have had vista up and running for months but my score is held back by
the HDD. When I had it on a 160GB Maxtor it scored 5.2 so the advice I
was given was to go to SATA from IDE. I purchased a 500GB Hitachi SATA2
drive but the score only improved to 5.3. After a bit of research I
discovered that the drive normally sets up at SATA1 speeds and needs to
be reset using the software provided at the Hitachi website. I did this
and made a bootable CD and used it to set the drive up at it's maximum
throughput but this made no difference. It still reads at 5.3. I put
up with this until now because I am running out of free space and need
some more. Do I buy a USB 1TB device at USB2 speeds or purchase a 1TB
Samsung f1 internal drive.
Will the boot time be decreased any? I am running a Q6600 at 2.8GHz on
an ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard with 4GB of PC6400 ram.

TIA

Robin

This is an example of a fast drive. But the boot time is
still not zero. (Gigabyte iRAM versus a Raptor.)

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=2480&p=7

Paul

In message MPG.239f6c006bd9f649989ad4@localhost Bill
was claimed to have wrote:

In article ,
says...
I have had vista up and running for months but my score is held back by the
HDD. When I had it on a 160GB Maxtor it scored 5.2 so the advice I was
given was to go to SATA from IDE. I purchased a 500GB Hitachi SATA2 drive
but the score only improved to 5.3. After a bit of research I discovered
that the drive normally sets up at SATA1 speeds and needs to be reset using
the software provided at the Hitachi website. I did this and made a
bootable CD and used it to set the drive up at it's maximum throughput but
this made no difference. It still reads at 5.3. I put up with this until
now because I am running out of free space and need some more.

The only way I know of to get a high 5.9 reading with Vista is to
run two fast SATA II drives in RAID 0, if your MB can do that.

Seagate's 7200.11 32MB 500GB (or larger) drives can score a 5.9 if your
controller is fast enough, assuming you run in AHCI mode with NCQ
enabled and remember to pull the 1.5Gb speed limiter jumper.

The 320GB version of that drive will only score a 5.8 on the same
system.

Paul wrote:
This is an example of a fast drive. But the boot time is
still not zero. (Gigabyte iRAM versus a Raptor.)

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=2480&p=7

Well that's interesting. Many of the Anandtech tests are highly system
dependent. Duh! I didn't see mention of the system specs, though.
I wish someone smarter would take that idea and run with it...
More info he http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

'Fishface' wrote:
Well that's interesting. Many of the Anandtech tests are highly system
dependent. Duh! I didn't see mention of the system specs, though.
I wish someone smarter would take that idea and run with it...
More info he http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
_____

'capacity up to 8 GiB'? Has the Wiki author spent too much time on first
person shooters with guts turned up?

Phil Weldon

"Fishface" ? wrote in message
...
Paul wrote:
This is an example of a fast drive. But the boot time is
still not zero. (Gigabyte iRAM versus a Raptor.)

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=2480&p=7

Well that's interesting. Many of the Anandtech tests are highly system
dependent. Duh! I didn't see mention of the system specs, though.
I wish someone smarter would take that idea and run with it...
More info he http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

Phil Weldon wrote:
'Fishface' wrote:
Well that's interesting. Many of the Anandtech tests are highly system
dependent. Duh! I didn't see mention of the system specs, though.
I wish someone smarter would take that idea and run with it...
More info he http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
_____

'capacity up to 8 GiB'? Has the Wiki author spent too much time on
first person shooters with guts turned up?

Phil Weldon

You can fill it with either, but it works better with one of the choices :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibs

Paul

'Paul' wrote:
You can fill it with either, but it works better with one of the choices
:-)
_____

Won't Gibs begin to smell?

Phil Weldon

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Phil Weldon wrote:
'Fishface' wrote:
Well that's interesting. Many of the Anandtech tests are highly system
dependent. Duh! I didn't see mention of the system specs, though.
I wish someone smarter would take that idea and run with it...
More info he http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
_____

'capacity up to 8 GiB'? Has the Wiki author spent too much time on first
person shooters with guts turned up?

Phil Weldon

You can fill it with either, but it works better with one of the choices
:-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibs

Paul