Re: A8N-E SATA speed

On 10/28/07 05:05 am Roger Hamlett wrote:

I have an A8N-E motherboard with the latest BIOS (1013, IIRC); it claims to have onboard SATA capable of 3.0GB/sec. I recently added a Seagate SATA drive that also claims to be capable of 3.0GB/sec., but in WinXP+SP2 Hardware Manager the only available transfer modes are 1.5G and PIO.

I installed the latest nForce drivers from the nVidia Web site, but there has been no change in the displayed transfer speed options. When I run the speed test, the sustained speed is little higher than that of an old ATA100 drive in the same machine.

Why no 3.0GB/sec?


Two things.
Check on the Seagate site. Some of their drives come configured to
only run the interface at 1.5GB/sec 'out of the box', because of
compatibility problems,with some older interfaces. Tthere is a
software utility (and in a few cases a jumper), to configure the drive
to use the 3G/sec rate.
However the big one is that this is a limiting speed on the interface,
not a speed that will ever be achieved by a drive. At present the
fastest drives are still slower than the older 1.5GB/sec interface,
and even talking to the internale RAM buffer, you are unlikely to get
much over the old rate. Think of the rate, like a speed limit on a
motorway. Raising the limit to 300mph, won't mean that cars can
actually 'do' this rate...

Yes, after I posted here I found the reference to the speed-limiting jumper. Removing it has increased the burst speed considerably but (for the reason you stated) hasn't made much difference to the sustained speed.

Thanks.

Perce
.

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