CUSL2-C, IBM DTLA Hard Drive & MatroxHDBenchmark Question for Gurus ;-)

[JoeDaring]

To the hardware gurus over there... (You know ho you are )

I have an UDMA-66 IBM 20 Gig hard disk drive (DTLA, alias Deskstar)... what speed should I expect from it? MatroxHDBenchMark rates it slightly more than 10Mb/sec... is that roughly correct, or should I expect something better?

As far as I know, UDMA is enabled: The Intel UltraATA Companion utility tells me it is "ON" both of my disks... BTW, in the Hardware Management Panel, I don't get all the option you people usually talk about, and the only one present "Write Cache" is enabled, but shaded and made unavailable.

The rest of my setup is as follows:

ASUS CUSL2-C
PIII 800Mhz
256M ram
Marvel G200 TV (PAL, tuner added after the purchase)
SBLive! 5.1 (Forgive our sins, Dr.Mordrid )
Sym810 SCSI Controller
Pioneer 104 DVD Player IDE
Yamaha 6416 CD-R/RW SCSI
Plextor PX40 SCSI
W2K SP2

Thanks EveryBody!

Joe Daring

[Sciascia]

The UDMA option is in the IDE controller section of hardware manager of Win2k. I think it is probably enabled since your HD marks for a single UDMA66 sound pretty close to right. I am not 100% since I only ever used RAID0 for my faster discs. I have FT 66 laying around that I haven't used for quite sometime, but I can't remember what the scores were exactly. I suppose it was around twice as fast which would sound right.

[JoeDaring]

Hi Sciascia,

Tnx for your reply, but I'm missing something here...

Are my drives running right? Why do you mention your FT (?) 66 drive going twice as fast?

Should I expect my Ultra ATA 66 to go around 20 Mb/sec???

Please elaborate!

Thanks in advance!

Joe daring

[JoeDaring]

nobody wants to say a word on this subject??!?

.....nnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGHHHHHHHEEEEE''''

(Crying in Italian )

Ciao! Joe daring

[Sciascia]

Sorry about the confusion. The FT is a RAID controller. It takes 2 HD's and stripes them or mirrors them. The striping is called RAID level 0 and treats both HD's like one. You have twice the size and it splits the data to each one so you have twice as much throughput. This is nice for using less expensive IDE HD's for video capture as compared to SCSI drives. The mirror option is RAID level 1 and just treats both HD's as the the same. It is for data backup and has no increase in performance and will only give you the size of one drive.

So to answer your question, no you should not have twice the throughput with just one drive on a Ultra66 controller. If you had 2 drives and a FT in RAID0 then yes it would be twice as fast. The only reason that I brought up the FT was that I never used the Ultra66 HD's without it and that was the only reference that I had.

In other words, I believe that your HD benchmark is right. If it was wrong then it would probably be somewhere in the 2-4mBit/sec range.

[Michel Carleer]

Aren't all DTLA in fact UDMA100 drives?
At least IBM HD table says so.
Michka