Attention Hitachi SATAII/NCQ owners!

[EQuito]

The new drives like the 80GB HDS728080PLA380 have SATA300 disable from factory.
To take full advantage of the drive's speed you must enable it by using Feature Tool (v1.97) (http://www.hitachigst.com/downloads/ftool_v197.exe) otherwise the drive is working as SATA150

DO NOT enable SATA300 if your controller doesn't support it!

Check out the burst rate after re-configuring the drives:

[Flintstone]

WOW! What about a sustained rate comparison? Same kind of results?

[EQuito]

No, there is not much difference in sustained rate.

[Gargoyle]

Is that ATTO of a single drive? Do you know if NCQ drives from other manufacturers are comparable? (I've been looking at a Seagate)

(edit) Oops, just saw your sig mentioning the RAID.

[lemonlime]

SATA 300 is another one of those 'ATA133 farce' things. Really, each SATA channel is allowed a maximum throughput of 150MB/s in version 1, and 300MB/s in version 2. I don't see how a single drive is going to be able to take advantage of 300MB/s. At least with U320, it is shared between as many as 14 devices, which makes sense to have such a high avaliable bandwidth.

About the only useful application of SATA300 I can think of, would be ESATA (external SATA) that some vendors are beginning to push. External storage devices or flash memory systems may be able to better use this bandwidth.

[EQuito]

SATA 300 is another one of those 'ATA133 farce' things.
The beauty of these drives is native NCQ not SATA300 speeds which btw neither HDTach nor ATTO can report accurately.

oh and don't forget the price, around $60 for an 80GB drive... :D

[lemonlime]

The beauty of these drives is native NCQ not SATA300 speeds which btw neither HDTach nor ATTO can report accurately.

oh and don't forget the price, around $60 for an 80GB drive... :D

I agree, NCQ and $60.. can't go wrong there :thumbsup:

[Tex]

ncq would usually be important in a application where the que depth is deeper and non sequential I-O is the norm. Bascially I-O patterns not associated with a desktop usually.

[Flintstone]

So, there is no real "real-world" benefit to us speed demons, eh?

[Tex]

If you load it up enough you bet! but thats why command queing shows slower on some bench marks and faster on others. It depends on how hard you load it up.

But make no mistake... The drives EQ are talking about are some of... if not THE fastest non raptor SATA drives made today period.

For the money they are absolutely killer!

Tex

[johnrr6]

Ran Hitachi's F-Tool on my two 80 gig SATA II drives to enable them both to use the SATA II interface of the DFI NForce4 Ultra-D.

Besides giving me the otion of turning on SATA II----there is also an option to turn on "Spread Spectrum Clocking"???

What the heck is that?? ---Another name for NCQ???

Do I need it???

Spread Spectrum on a board is never enabled for overclocking.

Anybody know what this term means on these Hitachi SATA II drives???

John
__________________

[EQuito]

What the heck is that?? ---Another name for NCQ???I have no idea and I don't remember seeing it. NCQ is already enable by default, check the properties of each drive.

[johnrr6]

Had something strange happen when I loaded windows last night and used the F6 Floppy for SATA RAID 0 on my DFI NF4-Ultra....

First off-----the two drivers on the Floppy had to be loaded in the exact sequence as described in the DFI manual----even though the second driver appears at the top when you pop in the floppy and you would naturally load that one first----do it out of sequence and windows doesn't recognize the Array. (had to restart windows load)

2nd----while windows was loading-----it kept asking for the Raidmngnt.ini file-----well, I found it-----it was still on the floppy----so I just kept directing it to the A Drive every time it asked (about 5 times). Very strange----but it now recognizes the striped array (Raid 0) and seems fine. In fact----it seems VERY fast. Faster than ANY array I've ever had. I haven't benched it yet-----but "feel" is VERY pleasant. The only thing I can think of is that my floppy was not up to snuff somehow...