Single SATA WD Raptor = 35Mb/sec?

Rbaker6

I posted this in the hardware/storage section but will try here too. My old regular ATA harddrive is showing about 30 Mb/Sec in ATTO.

GigaByte GA-K8NNXP MB
WD SATA Raptor 36Gb 10000 RPM
Sil3512 SATA controller hooked up to the Raptor, in single disk base config
GigaRAID controller running 1 optical drive in non-RAID mode
2 ATA drives, 1 optical drive on the main IDE controllers
Sil3512 RAID driver 1.1.0.52
AMD64 3400+
1Gb PC400 RAM
PC Power & Cooling 510W TurboCool Deluxe PS w/ SATA power leads
W2K SP4

I am booting off of the RAPTOR. No IRQ conflicts that I can see.

ATTO shows read performance of about 35 Mb/Sec and write performance up to 100 Mb/Sec!?

I have a couple of anamolies during boot up that may offer clues: The regular GigaRAID ATA controller takes a good minute to find my optical IDE drives, and complains that I am not using the right cable, and that I am limited to ATA/33. Also there is a long delay verifying some sort of DMI pool settings on the Raptor. I am using the GigaRaid ATA controller for one of my optical drives. But I would not think this would slow down the SATA controller? Could the Sil3512 conflict with the GigaRAID controller at all? I will try disabling it and see if that helps, since I boot off of the Sil3512.

Someone mentioned that a single drive can be run in RAID configuration and that the RAID should be selected and the RAID driver used. I selected RAID instead of BASE in BIOS and got a BSOD. Probably because I could not figure out how to configure the RAID utility for a single drive.

[Edit]
I disabled the GigaRaid controller -- no difference.

Tex

Try posting the actual atto. That drive should hit 55 to 60,000 on reads and a tad lower on writes. The only option to change when you run ATTo is make the total length to 32mb for the test. Use sandra and take a pic of the IRQ's and post that with teh ATTO for me. Also make sure you have the latest bios and drivers for that board.

Tex

Rbaker6

Here is the ATTO screenshot and IRQ screen shot.

Tex

whats the cluster size and is it fat32 or ntfs? What pci latency is set as the default in the bios? Are you using all the devices in that IRQ map? Disable any unused ones.

Rbaker6

Thanks for your help. Okay, it is NTFS and 4K cluster size (the default). I disabled all the USB controllers and the Firewire controller. No change. I am looking into the PCI latency. My BIOS doesn't support changing it, but I guess Powerstrip does. This is an AGP setting to do with my ATI 9800Pro video card? According to Samba, it is using 255 clicks. I started reading about PCI latency. It is interesting if this is the problem.

This machine is pretty close to top of the line a couple of months ago. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Though it sounds like Gigabyte boards and Silicon Image controllers have lots of problems from what I read here.

I haven't played with jumper setting on the drive because from what I remember there is not much to change with SATA drives. Do you think it makes any difference that my boot drive is drive F:? I have optical drives and IDE drives for the rest.