P-ATA vs SATA

[Keltzar]

hi all

recently, my second HDD in my setup of 2 EIDE HDDs crashed, taking out my image library.

So, seeing that my motherboard can support both P-ATA and SATA, I went out and bought a SATA drive 200gb.

So now, I am running an ABIT AV8 motherboard with 2 hdds: a PATA/EIDE Seagate 160gb (paritioned as 40 and 120gb) and a SATA West.d 200GB.

I planned to used my 200GB SATA as a backup for the master image library that resides on my seagate, and as a scratchdisk for photoshop.

However, when I backup my image files from the seagate (PATA) to the West.D (SATA), it takes a whole 75-90mins to backup 20GB. This seems phenomenally slow... esp. since my friend who runs an older ATH-64 2200 takes just 20mins to backup this much between his 2 PATA drives.

Can anyone advise what may be wrong? The drives themselves work ok, just that everything is slow. And when the file transfer is in process... my whole computer slows to the point that I can't do other things.

 

[brandonb]

hi all

recently, my second HDD in my setup of 2 EIDE HDDs crashed, taking out my image library.

So, seeing that my motherboard can support both P-ATA and SATA, I went out and bought a SATA drive 200gb.

So now, I am running an ABIT AV8 motherboard with 2 hdds: a PATA/EIDE Seagate 160gb (paritioned as 40 and 120gb) and a SATA West.d 200GB.

I planned to used my 200GB SATA as a backup for the master image library that resides on my seagate, and as a scratchdisk for photoshop.

However, when I backup my image files from the seagate (PATA) to the West.D (SATA), it takes a whole 75-90mins to backup 20GB. This seems phenomenally slow... esp. since my friend who runs an older ATH-64 2200 takes just 20mins to backup this much between his 2 PATA drives.

Can anyone advise what may be wrong? The drives themselves work ok, just that everything is slow. And when the file transfer is in process... my whole computer slows to the point that I can't do other things.

Try to turn off all the opening program..antivirus....nnd others those in the taskbar. It also depend on your processor speed as well.

 

[Firefox]

Several things you can do:

Update the chipset drivers (get the Hyperion 4-in-1 drivers from VIA Arena)
Update the SATA controller's drivers.
There may be an issue with the provided drivers in the drivers diskette. Some people have reported that the drivers on the provided diskette don't work properly for WinXP.

Check your Device manager to ensure that the drives are all functioning in Ultra DMA mode rather than PIO mode.

If all else fails, you may need to flash your controller and/ or motherboard BIOS to the latest version if it isn't already so.

 

[idor]

hey Keltzar,
First and foremost, you need to know what chipset if your PC.... if it is those old 2003 springdale chipset from intel... erm... think streetname is called i865 chipset, then your SATA is not a real SATA... it is a SATA emulation....... In addition to that, Lab test have shown that in those chipset, sustained data transfer speed between PATA and SATA is qestionable. In most cases adding a true SATA controller card will solve the problem. and If your motherboard is designed for AMD CPUs, the problem with intel chipset is present cos MB manufacturers added SATA for AMD machines much later than intel. Hopes this helps...

 

[Firefox]

hey Keltzar,
First and foremost, you need to know what chipset if your PC.... if it is those old 2003 springdale chipset from intel... erm... think streetname is called i865 chipset, then your SATA is not a real SATA... it is a SATA emulation....... In addition to that, Lab test have shown that in those chipset, sustained data transfer speed between PATA and SATA is qestionable. In most cases adding a true SATA controller card will solve the problem. and If your motherboard is designed for AMD CPUs, the problem with intel chipset is present cos MB manufacturers added SATA for AMD machines much later than intel. Hopes this helps...

i865 has proper SATA support through the ICH5(R) actually..

His computer is running on the VIA KT800 chipset.. And we all know how problematic VIA chipsets are...

 

[Keltzar]

yah...

anyway, after hours of reading and research I appear to have solved the problem though I don't know how... my performance is up 400%. A 20gb of data now takes 15mins to transfer between PATA and SATA.

Essnetially all I did was take the original ABIt CD and install the SATA driver for RAID and RAID toolkit. Although I don't have a RAID array, it seems to have solved the problem. Some HDD testing software I used seem to have confirmed it.... the SATA drive appears to read/write at about 25% faster than the PATA.

Since this thread is open...
is it easy to flash the bios? I noticed that my AV8 motherboard bios has been updated to v22 as of 15th July. The last time someone helped me flash the bios was in Jan2005.

 

[Firefox]

It depends.. But users seem to say that it could be problematic for the Abit AV8... You *might* want to buy a spare BIOS rom first.. Just in case..

 

[Dann]

Check first what the new bios changes are. And if the changes are neccessary for you or not. Sometimes the changes are to recognise newer cpu and if you don intend to upgrade your cpu soon then there's no need to flash the bios now. But if it's something thats critical then you will need to update the bios. You can find out how to flash the bios on their website. Just print out the steps and follow them. Make sure you download the correct bios for your M/B model and version.

 

[Keltzar]

... the biggest attraction is proper running of their "cool and quiet" function.

... is this important?