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Kermit

Member

From: Chorzów, Poland

Registered: 2006-03-25

Posts: 78

Is this SATA II or not?

Hi everyone. Today I need your help, because I'm feeling confused now

2 days ago my old Samsung SP2504C died. So yesterday I bought a new HDD Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB (ST3320620A) . On my box from PC (I bought PC two years ago in some electronic shop) I can read that, I have ASUS P5VD2-MX mobo with VIA P4M890 chipset - it's mean I have SATA II support, yes?

My problem is simple. My HDD is slow.
A "fancy icon" in KDE4 shows me ~40MB/s during copy 1,3GB file.
A hdparm -tT /dev/sda:

root@kermit kermit]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   1330 MB in  2.00 seconds = 664.91 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  338 MB in  3.01 seconds = 112.42 MB/sec

DMESG log
lspci

I don't feel that my PC is slow or something. But in that same way runs my old HDD and maybe this speed is "normal" for me Furthermore if I have SATA II support on MOBO and HDD so I want to use it What can be a problem here?

Kermit.

JGC

Developer

Registered: 2003-12-03

Posts: 1,664

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

First of all, your disk is running in SATA150 mode, not SATA300. This is because your VIA chipset doesn't support any higher mode. The SATA300 specs advertised by Asus is only available on the JMicron controller on your board, which is not the one you want to use (it's limited by PCI or PCI-e interface, so you won't get past 100MB/s with this thing).
Second thing, the SATA link speed only affects the cache transfer rate. The disk itself won't do more than the sequential read you got from hdparm, not even when you run it on SATA300.
Then the 40MB/s thing... where are you copying from? If it's coming from the same disk, the performance isn't bad.

Kermit

Member

From: Chorzów, Poland

Registered: 2006-03-25

Posts: 78

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

Ok I see.

Should I change a transfer limit to 1,5GB/s by jumper-switch? Now there is 3GB/s limit made.

I copied this file to the other folder in the same disk and partition.

Kermit.

EDIT:
I made some more test and now during copying 8GB file from 1 directory to other one on the same disk and partiton the transfer is ~20-40MB/s.

Kermit.

Last edited by Kermit (2009-03-18 11:44:25)

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

If everything is working then just let it be.
As far as I know the jumper to limit the transfer rate (and other things I guess, I'm not sure if it disables ncq too) is there just in case the chipset on the board and the disk don't play well together.

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

tkdfighter

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2009-01-28

Posts: 126

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

Try something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/test bs=10240 count=100" to test the write speed. This will at least not be limited by some other factor, the only bottleneck will be the disk you're writing to. Not a very realistic benchmark, but a good test to measure maximum throughput.

Kermit

Member

From: Chorzów, Poland

Registered: 2006-03-25

Posts: 78

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

@tkdfighter, the result: ~425MB/s.

Kermit.

Dieter@be

Forum Fellow

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-11-05

Posts: 2,001

Website

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

Try something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/test bs=10240 count=100" to test the write speed. This will at least not be limited by some other factor, the only bottleneck will be the disk you're writing to. Not a very realistic benchmark, but a good test to measure maximum throughput.

the size of that test is too small. your test file will probably end up in the filesystems writeback cache end you'll see results that are way too high.

there is nothing wrong with numbers the OP has posted already.  that's pretty much how every disk performs.

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< Daenyth> and he works prolifically
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Kermit

Member

From: Chorzów, Poland

Registered: 2006-03-25

Posts: 78

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

I made this test (with dd=...) five times for 1GB file -> result: ~115.
Maybe it's slow. Maybe it's fast -> I don't know. Now I know that I don't have SATA-II support on MOBO.

Thanks for help guys. If someone have an idea for speed test then feel free to post it

Kermit.

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

Usually I do

dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile_on_drive_to_test bs=100M count=10

and usually the result is usually believable.

@Kermit
That value seems to be ok for a recent desktop drive. The last review/comparison I've seen shows the disk's speed peek around that value.

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,819

Website

Re: Is this SATA II or not?

I'd like to add there is no such thing as 'S-ATA II'.

It is a pure marketing term and people buy it (even the ones that usually know what they are talking about). There is no S-ATA II spec, there are different speed grades however, and S-ATA 150 and 300 (1,5 Gbps and 3 Gbps) are two of those. 6 Gbps is in the works, it seems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA … I_misnomer

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