About ready to kill Gigabyte...

[entropy]

I've installed Xp pro three times now...every time my sata drive is detected, but when i get in xp, it's listed at ata100 (according to hd tune, sandra, and msinfo32.exe). i've tried the intel f6 driver for when you install...but, my sata drivers are built into my chipset, and the hdd IS detected when windows installs, but why not as SATA?! i'm incredibly frustrated and am on the verge of rma'ing this board (which is a gigabyte ga8ipe1000L revision 2) DESPERATELY IN NEED OF HELP!!!!! this is getting to be ridiculous! and in my bios I CANNOT SELECT SCSI AS A BOOT DEVICE. sry, but everyone keeps telling me that and i'm saying out front that it isn't possible for some reason, it's like it doesn't exist. i'm using a single seagate sata 120gig drive. please help me!!

EDIT (by Spinner): For back story please read here: http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11413&page=2&pp=20

[shwaip]

when you bench it, how does it perform?

[entropy]

like so ... taken using seagate 120 gig sata (supposedly) hdd, p4 2.8c w/ht enabled) and gf2 mx400 (doub that could affect, but who knows) and some other devices.

[Spinner]

List your full system specs please, in as much detail as possible. And if possible post a screenshot of what Windows sees your hard drive at. (Go to My Computer - Right Click on the drive in question - properties - hardware - prtscn).

I'm not quite sure what the problem is you're having. Your OS boots up fine on the disk in question, the hard drive seems to be working and is fully accessible. And by the look of your benchmark everything seems to be performing as well as it should. Why have you had to re-install Windows several times?

I can't comment specifically to your situation, but a lot of the current SATA drives are actually just PATA drives with built in socket adapters, so it would be reasonable to assume that some might still project themselves as ATA100 drives when working individually. I don't know, just an idea. But if your drive is plugged into the SATA port on your mobo, and you're running Windows on it. Then I don't think you have anything to worry about. I think that might be how it is supposed to be.

As I said before, most SATA drives on the market at the moment are PATA drives with socket adapters built in, but even with most true SATA drives, currently they are only slightly faster, if at all, than ATA100 (PATA) based hard drives.

[MediaMan]

Have you updated to the latest BIOS (VER FF) and confirmed the BIOS flash did take? I've sometimes found that the @BIOS feature doesn't work.

If you're connected to the ICH5R southbridge for SATA, you'll need the Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition

http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa_raid/

but you don't need to create a RAID array to achieve SATA 150. The SATA 150 spec is based on single drive performance. You may also need to install SP 1 (or now 2) as well.

A RAID 0 array of 2 SATA 150 drives will be faster than a single SATA 150 drive, but this is true for any type of drive be it SCSI or IDE.

The Intel link above has good instructions on how to do this in a new build as well.

The Promise SATA controller can be used in either regular IDE mode or RAID just like the ICH5R southbridge.

Looks like it isn't a Gigabyte problem.

Hope this helps

[MediaMan]

Entr0py


well????? Did it work...are you in SATA 150 land?

[entropy]

ok guys, sorry for the long wait time, but i've been very busy lately. i have the latest bios, ff, it shows that in the bios at bootup. yes there aren't any problems, just that it's running slower than it should be. and this is a true sata drive, the power isn't a molex, it needs a sata power adapter.

[entropy]

oh, and i can't run the raid application acclerator, it always says it can't work in this system. btw, the sata is connected via ich5, not ich5r ... either way it should support sata...

[profdlp]

Download ATTO (http://www.attotech.com/software/app1.html) (you want the one named "Windows SCSI Utilities") and run the ATTO Disk Benchmark (make sure you set "Total Length" to 32MB).

Many people here use ATTO and have more experience diagnosing the results.

[entropy]

ran atto, and keep in mind this *IS* a sata drive...i closed basically everything but my av

[Tex]

Thats maybe 10 to 15 percent off what a normal sata drive will hit. And thats on the rim You didn't say what sata drive you have. The fastest non raptors get around 55,000 to 60,000 on a empty drive testing right on the rim. Depending on how full the drive and what kind of drive it is 50,000 or so is about right. If that drive is 20 to 25 percent full its probably a perfect score from atto also. You might check the pci latency as increasing it a tad if its at 32 now may buy another 5 to 10 percent. Also see if any devices share an irq with the controller as that might bump it a few percentage points.

Tex

[entropy]

how do i change the pci latency? it's a seagate (i think...very difficult to tell) 120gig. and it's slightly over 1/3 full. but, even if it's not that slow, shouldn't it at least be listed as scsi/sata device? it isn't mapped over to an ide port, and sisoft says it's listed under ata/atapi devices.

[Spinner]

Yea, there's nothing really wrong with those scores mate. Like I said before with your previous bench, they look about right. You could get it a little higher with a good defrag and a little latency tweaking but that's about right on.

That RAID utility you spoke of probably doesn't work, because you don't have a RAID array. Simple as that I think.

Let me re-iterate something to you though mate. With the exception of a few, most SATA drives currently on the market, true or not, perform just about the same as PATA drives. It is just a different interface and controller standard. SATA has the potential to grow into something a lot faster than PATA, but currently it is not. Those scores, are fine. You have nothing to worry about.

Cheers

[Spinner]

how do i change the pci latency? it's a seagate (i think...very difficult to tell) 120gig. and it's slightly over 1/3 full. but, even if it's not that slow, shouldn't it at least be listed as scsi/sata device? it isn't mapped over to an ide port, and sisoft says it's listed under ata/atapi devices.
If you're not even sure what hard drive you've got, how can you say you know it's a true SATA drive? :)

Basic tips for benching are, running the benchmark program with no other applications running, background or otherwise and making sure your disk is freshly de-fragged.

PowerStrip last time I checked, is quite a good tool for tweaking pci latency and what not, but you probably won't notice any significant gains unless your system is currently running at a disadvantage in that respect.

[Tex]

how do i change the pci latency? it's a seagate (i think...very difficult to tell) 120gig. and it's slightly over 1/3 full. but, even if it's not that slow, shouldn't it at least be listed as scsi/sata device? it isn't mapped over to an ide port, and sisoft says it's listed under ata/atapi devices.

If its 1/3 full your right on for performance. Every differant chip from SI to HPt to Promise etc... shows the devices differantly. the fastest drives run only at slightly more then 1/3 the speed of sata anyway. Your drive runs at 1/3 the speed of sata but... still HALF of ata100 speeds also. Worry less about how it shows up in the differant utilitys that depending on the version of the utilty which may not be up to date with current drivers etc... and concentrate on ..... is it performing on par with what I should expect from the drive?

You have a 1/3 full drive that might hit 50 to 55,000 empty and gets slower the farther in you go. And your hitting 45,000 so.....

Your right there baby! Now you can go sleep happy again.

tex

[entropy]

@Spinner, i know it's true sata because it doesn't have the molex power connector. the reason i'm not sure if it's a seagate or not, is because on the outside, it just says OEM, in bios - OEM, sandra - OEM. from the numbers in bios i googled and got seagate's site, but there's no saying that other companies didn't make the same numbers, as they may or may not be model-specific, i didn't know.

[Spinner]

@Spinner, i know it's true sata because it doesn't have the molex power connector. the reason i'm not sure if it's a seagate or not, is because on the outside, it just says OEM, in bios - OEM, sandra - OEM. from the numbers in bios i googled and got seagate's site, but there's no saying that other companies didn't make the same numbers, as they may or may not be model-specific, i didn't know.
I see. :)