Falsely Recognised SATA HDDs

[nephilim666]

I have just purchased and put together the following components:-

ASUS P4PE SATA/RAID Motherboard
Intel IV 3,06 Northwood
2 x 512MB Samsung DDRAM PC333 CL2.5 16ch
2 x Seagate Barracuda SerialATA V 80GB ST380023/13AS
ATX-Netzteil PFC ProSilence(Goldedition)420W

Motherboard ASUS P4PE Rev 1.03 MoBo Bios REV 1005
Onboard Promise SATA/RAID controller PDC20376 BIOS 1.00.0.21

WIndows XP Pro
Driver version for RAID=Promise FastTrak 376/378 Version 1.0.1450.25
All BIOS settings concerning RAM, CPU, AGP and FSB speeds have been left at default ( I hav'nt started fiddling yet )

I have connected the 2 HDDs to the onboard SATA connectors with the appropriate cables and configured it as STRIPE 0. I was bitten with the RAID bug by my last ( and still running ABIT KG7/RAID 2 x IBM DTLA 307030 system AMD 1700+ ) because I like the speed when I am shovelling big .mpg files around.

Now my question is:-

on my new machine, that seems to be working fine, I have looked into the PROMISE Fast Build Utility which appears shortly after the POST and it shows my HDDs as running as UDMA 5. I installed the PAM programme from PROMISE and it also confirmed that the HDDs were being correctly identified but set at UDMA 5. I have been in contact with SEAGATE and although they answered extremely fast they were not able too help me and referred me to PROMISE who pointed out that they give no help for OEM solutions who pointed me too ASUS who give no help whatsoever ( experience I have had with a V7700 Graphics card ) Correct me if I am wrong but UDMA 5 means ( theoretically ) that my HDDs are running at 100 mbs UDMA 6 133mbs and SATA should be ( once again theoretically ) 150mbs.

Has anyone else a similar setup ( I know Harald7 does and I have asked him in another thread ) and could they tell me what their FastTrak Setup Utility ( appears after POST ) tells them.


I thank you in advance for any information or advice that you can give me.

[sixf00t4]

welcome to Techimo!

i wish i could answer your questions, but all i know how to do is give you a bump

[Harold7]

nephilim666

I found this article at Tom's Hardware http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage...204/index.html which will explain the performance issues with the Seagate SATA drives and various controller options.

My Raid array shows U5 as well, but as you'll read in the article, UDMA 5 performance is normal in this first generation SATA HD/RAID Contoller setup with the Seagate drives.

True SATA 1 transfer rates (150MB/sec) are probably still a ways off in the future.

I found this site http://www.iol.ie/~padraiga/speeds which has a pretty comprehensive list of data for HD performance standards.

If you run the SI Sandra File System tests, you can compare your results with the various HD types the benchmarks show... I rechecked my results and I get 43,495 MB/sec with my Raid array, which to me is pretty good performance, though to be honest I knew up front when I bought my Seagate SATA drives, that the best performance I was likely to see was ATA100 at best.

[nephilim666]

Well Harald maybe I will get some sleep tonight although I find it kind of annoying that after paying good money for these discs that they do not substantially increase my data transfer rate. Is this a software or a hardware thing?

I suppose I will have to wait and see what the future brings.

I would still be interested in what other users with this system configuration are seeing. I will benchmark with Sandra and see what comes up.

Thanks once again.

[nephilim666]

After defragging my C: partition I ran Sandra and was surprised to see the number 53172 which is well over what I expected. According to Sandra this is a higher rate than a U320 SCSI sytem. I really don't place too much trust in benchmarking.

Also I have the side of the case off and the Seagate SATA V HDDs seem very hot, is this normal? My IBM DTLA 307030 ( 2 running as RAID 0 ) discs in my other machine never get this hot.

[kauferlie]

I have the exact same SATA drive on my P4PE, and Windows XP claims not to detect a H.drive in the system (eventhough I can access and write to the drive via the command line).

I ran Seagate's discwizard, and yet XP doesn't see the drive.

Can you explain how you installed yours?

[Harold7]

kauferlie

Exactly what SATA setup do you have?

Do you also have IDE drives connected?

I have 2 Seagate 120 GB SATA drives in Raid 0 with no IDE HDs installed.

Make sure you have the Promise controller enabled in the ASUS bios setup.

Do you have an SATA RAID setup or some combo of SATA/IDE drives?

Is your OS on the SATA drive (s) or on IDE?

[kauferlie]

...................The Seagate SATA is my first and only drive in this brand new system.

[Harold7]

You might try entering your motherboards Raid utility and try setting up a single disk Raid 0 array... it does work BTW, the ASUS documentation for using SATA drives is pretty slim and I suspect that in order to use a single SATA drive in a system with this MB, you have to build a single disk Raid array so the Promise controller has something to see.

When you installed your OS on the new Seagate SATA drive did you hit F6 to install the SATA controller driver when asked by WIN XP setup or did you use Ghost or some other program to copy an existing image file of an OS to the HD?

Did you enable the SATA controller in the P4PE bios?

[kauferlie]

Promise is enabled on mobo.

BTW I was under the impression that 1 SATA drive should be fine, especially since SATA eliminates that whole master-slave situation of IDE.

As far as ASUS support on this issue, btw, they are at a loss, which is ridiculous. They have been emaling me worthless info for over 2 weeks now.