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P4T533 Raid Controller
I have this motherboard & until now have had the hard drive attached to the
primary ide cable. The system shows it to be UDMA 5. I ran SiSoft Sandra on it & it benchmarked around 33. I decided to try the drive on the Raid controller (Promise FastTrak133 Lite) which is supposed to be an ATA133 controller & ran Sandra again. This time I get anywhere from 29 - 32. I thought that ATA133 was UDMA 6 & I thought that this controller would make the drive faster. I am not using the RAID capabilities of the controller -- I want it only for UDMA. I've been doing some research & have seen mention of the Lumberjack bios hacks. So, I have a few questions: 1) Shouldn't the RAID controller be faster than the IDE controller? 2) How can I tell what UDMA the system is using for the drive while on the RAID controller. I don't see that anywhere in Device Manager. 3) Would using a Lumberjack bios make the controller faster & if so, which one would I want -- Full Raid, or PureUDMA? Thanks, Julie |
#2
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HDJulie schrieb:
I have this motherboard & until now have had the hard drive attached to the primary ide cable. The system shows it to be UDMA 5. I ran SiSoft Sandra on it & it benchmarked around 33. Forget Sandra as a hard drive benchmark. I decided to try the drive on the Raid controller (Promise FastTrak133 Lite) which is supposed to be an ATA133 controller & ran Sandra again. This time I get anywhere from 29 - 32. I thought that ATA133 was UDMA 6 & I thought that this controller would make the drive faster. I am not using the RAID capabilities of the controller -- I want it only for UDMA. I've been doing some research & have seen mention of the Lumberjack bios hacks. So, I have a few questions: 1) Shouldn't the RAID controller be faster than the IDE controller? Not necessarily. It's attached to the PCI bus (133 MB/s burst max, but ~90-110 MB/s realistic, and shared with a bunch of other devices), which is attached to the southbridge, while the onboard IDE is attached directly to the southbridge, which has a 266 MB/s HubLink interface to the northbridge. Also, performance on Promise controllers using the Lite RAID BIOS has been found to be suboptimal. Also, chances are your hard drive does not even support UDMA133 (until recently, only Maxtor used that). 2) How can I tell what UDMA the system is using for the drive while on the RAID controller. I don't see that anywhere in Device Manager. On a normal Promise UltraXYZ controller, this is shown during bootup. 3) Would using a Lumberjack bios make the controller faster & if so, which one would I want -- Full Raid, or PureUDMA? The latter, if anything. IMHO you can connect your hard drive to the onboard IDE again; should it really be too slow (which it does not seem to be), only a hard drive upgrade will *significantly* boost performance. Stephan -- Home: http://stephan.win31.de/ | Webm.: http://www.i24.com/ PC#6: i440LX, 2xCel300A, 256 MB, 18 GB, ATI AGP 32 MB, 110W This is a SCSI-inside, Legacy-plus, TCPA-free computer Reply to newsgroup only. | S: Kleinen Coppermine Slot 1 (günstig) |
#3
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Thanks for the information! One more thing -- I am using a Maxtor 120GB
drive so it *should* get UDMA 6. I think I'll go back to the IDE connection. That way, I don't have the lousy boot up delay from the RAID controller. "Stephan Grossklass" wrote in message ... HDJulie schrieb: I have this motherboard & until now have had the hard drive attached to the primary ide cable. The system shows it to be UDMA 5. I ran SiSoft Sandra on it & it benchmarked around 33. Forget Sandra as a hard drive benchmark. I decided to try the drive on the Raid controller (Promise FastTrak133 Lite) which is supposed to be an ATA133 controller & ran Sandra again. This time I get anywhere from 29 - 32. I thought that ATA133 was UDMA 6 & I thought that this controller would make the drive faster. I am not using the RAID capabilities of the controller -- I want it only for UDMA. I've been doing some research & have seen mention of the Lumberjack bios hacks. So, I have a few questions: 1) Shouldn't the RAID controller be faster than the IDE controller? Not necessarily. It's attached to the PCI bus (133 MB/s burst max, but ~90-110 MB/s realistic, and shared with a bunch of other devices), which is attached to the southbridge, while the onboard IDE is attached directly to the southbridge, which has a 266 MB/s HubLink interface to the northbridge. Also, performance on Promise controllers using the Lite RAID BIOS has been found to be suboptimal. Also, chances are your hard drive does not even support UDMA133 (until recently, only Maxtor used that). 2) How can I tell what UDMA the system is using for the drive while on the RAID controller. I don't see that anywhere in Device Manager. On a normal Promise UltraXYZ controller, this is shown during bootup. 3) Would using a Lumberjack bios make the controller faster & if so, which one would I want -- Full Raid, or PureUDMA? The latter, if anything. IMHO you can connect your hard drive to the onboard IDE again; should it really be too slow (which it does not seem to be), only a hard drive upgrade will *significantly* boost performance. Stephan -- Home: http://stephan.win31.de/ | Webm.: http://www.i24.com/ PC#6: i440LX, 2xCel300A, 256 MB, 18 GB, ATI AGP 32 MB, 110W This is a SCSI-inside, Legacy-plus, TCPA-free computer Reply to newsgroup only. | S: Kleinen Coppermine Slot 1 (günstig) |
#4
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Oh, I forgot to ask -- what kind of hard drive upgrade could I do to
significantly improve performance? I'm using a Maxtor 120GB with 8MB cache now. Should I go to a SCSI drive? "Stephan Grossklass" wrote in message ... HDJulie schrieb: I have this motherboard & until now have had the hard drive attached to the primary ide cable. The system shows it to be UDMA 5. I ran SiSoft Sandra on it & it benchmarked around 33. Forget Sandra as a hard drive benchmark. I decided to try the drive on the Raid controller (Promise FastTrak133 Lite) which is supposed to be an ATA133 controller & ran Sandra again. This time I get anywhere from 29 - 32. I thought that ATA133 was UDMA 6 & I thought that this controller would make the drive faster. I am not using the RAID capabilities of the controller -- I want it only for UDMA. I've been doing some research & have seen mention of the Lumberjack bios hacks. So, I have a few questions: 1) Shouldn't the RAID controller be faster than the IDE controller? Not necessarily. It's attached to the PCI bus (133 MB/s burst max, but ~90-110 MB/s realistic, and shared with a bunch of other devices), which is attached to the southbridge, while the onboard IDE is attached directly to the southbridge, which has a 266 MB/s HubLink interface to the northbridge. Also, performance on Promise controllers using the Lite RAID BIOS has been found to be suboptimal. Also, chances are your hard drive does not even support UDMA133 (until recently, only Maxtor used that). 2) How can I tell what UDMA the system is using for the drive while on the RAID controller. I don't see that anywhere in Device Manager. On a normal Promise UltraXYZ controller, this is shown during bootup. 3) Would using a Lumberjack bios make the controller faster & if so, which one would I want -- Full Raid, or PureUDMA? The latter, if anything. IMHO you can connect your hard drive to the onboard IDE again; should it really be too slow (which it does not seem to be), only a hard drive upgrade will *significantly* boost performance. Stephan -- Home: http://stephan.win31.de/ | Webm.: http://www.i24.com/ PC#6: i440LX, 2xCel300A, 256 MB, 18 GB, ATI AGP 32 MB, 110W This is a SCSI-inside, Legacy-plus, TCPA-free computer Reply to newsgroup only. | S: Kleinen Coppermine Slot 1 (günstig) |
#5
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Try HDTach for a benchmark
"HDJulie" wrote in message news:2UzWa.7707$5f.3268@lakeread05... I have this motherboard & until now have had the hard drive attached to the primary ide cable. The system shows it to be UDMA 5. I ran SiSoft Sandra on it & it benchmarked around 33. I decided to try the drive on the Raid controller (Promise FastTrak133 Lite) which is supposed to be an ATA133 controller & ran Sandra again. This time I get anywhere from 29 - 32. I thought that ATA133 was UDMA 6 & I thought that this controller would make the drive faster. I am not using the RAID capabilities of the controller -- I want it only for UDMA. I've been doing some research & have seen mention of the Lumberjack bios hacks. So, I have a few questions: 1) Shouldn't the RAID controller be faster than the IDE controller? 2) How can I tell what UDMA the system is using for the drive while on the RAID controller. I don't see that anywhere in Device Manager. 3) Would using a Lumberjack bios make the controller faster & if so, which one would I want -- Full Raid, or PureUDMA? Thanks, Julie |
#6
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HDJulie schrieb:
Oh, I forgot to ask -- what kind of hard drive upgrade could I do to significantly improve performance? I'm using a Maxtor 120GB with 8MB cache now. Should I go to a SCSI drive? The only thing that would be significantly faster than your current hard drive is a current 15k rpm SCSI drive (of which the Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 is the most "desktop friendly" noise wise - you'll just need to cool it). I don't know, however, whether you'd want to spend the money on the drive, an U160 (or U320) host adapter and U160/U320 cable. Stephan -- Home: http://stephan.win31.de/ | Webm.: http://www.i24.com/ PC#6: i440LX, 2xCel300A, 256 MB, 18 GB, ATI AGP 32 MB, 110W This is a SCSI-inside, Legacy-plus, TCPA-free computer Reply to newsgroup only. | S: Kleinen Coppermine Slot 1 (günstig) |
#7
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No, I don't want to spend the money just yet. It's not like the system is
slow as it is. I'd just like for everything to pop open instantly, as soon as I click on it :-). I'll wait until I can afford to build another new system with an 800FSB, processor with HT, etc, etc, etc. Thanks so much for your help! Julie "Stephan Grossklass" wrote in message ... HDJulie schrieb: Oh, I forgot to ask -- what kind of hard drive upgrade could I do to significantly improve performance? I'm using a Maxtor 120GB with 8MB cache now. Should I go to a SCSI drive? The only thing that would be significantly faster than your current hard drive is a current 15k rpm SCSI drive (of which the Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 is the most "desktop friendly" noise wise - you'll just need to cool it). I don't know, however, whether you'd want to spend the money on the drive, an U160 (or U320) host adapter and U160/U320 cable. Stephan -- Home: http://stephan.win31.de/ | Webm.: http://www.i24.com/ PC#6: i440LX, 2xCel300A, 256 MB, 18 GB, ATI AGP 32 MB, 110W This is a SCSI-inside, Legacy-plus, TCPA-free computer Reply to newsgroup only. | S: Kleinen Coppermine Slot 1 (günstig) |
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