A7V Promise ATA100 slower than onboard Via ATA66?!!

[labrador]

I've just benchmarked 2 drives (not the same) with the Ultra 100 and Ultra 66 controllers from Promise. The Ultra 66
is in a P2 450 machine with a 20 GB Quantum Fireball CX2, while the Ultra 100 is in a P2 266 machine with a 15 GB Maxtor 5400 RPM with the H in the model name to designate UDMA100.

I used Threadmark from Boot magazine disc 23.

Here is the summary result:

P2 266 with Ultra 100 and Maxtor:

Data Transfer Rate (MB/sec) was 8.88.
Average CPU Utilization was 54.88 percent.

P2 450 with Ultra 66 and Quantum:

Data Transfer Rate (MB/sec) was 6.94.
Average CPU Utilization was 29.36 percent.


I wondered if we would have one of those Matrox/Promise collisions but it looks not.

I wonder if the pauses mentioned earlier were from accessing CDROM or floppy by Windows ME. It seems to have some strange behaviour for scanning both of these (for example, when My Computer is given a right click, the floppy runs).

[DentyCracker]

Windows Me = crap. They removed cdplayer.exe , now CDs don't play right (pauses inserted between tracks where there aren't any), and it kept hanging, thank God i'd saved my system files so voilá no more winme.
Of course I'll try it again when I get a new HD, and found a proper CDPlayer app for it.
God I hate wmplayer.exe

[labrador]

The new media player needs Direct X to get things going, likely due to the visualization aspect. I helped a neighbour get around a problem by updating video and sound drivers for his crappy Trident cards and then the Media Player worked OK.

The clue was that the DX diagnose program showed the drivers were not certified.

I think the pauses there would be related
to running the visualization aspect. Especially if the sound card is an Ensoniq (audio pci/Soundblaster 64 PCI), which have problems with stuttering even when scrolling in a web browser.

[Jammrock]

AND THE WINNER OF THE WORST HARD DRIVE EVER MADE IS....

Quantum's Bigfoot

They used to pack these in the Compaq deskpro's. Within 2 years 75% of these drives crashed and burned. They were slow, poorly built and downright the worst POS's I ever had to deal with.

Bad Drive makers:

Fujitsu (had an entire batch come in bad at a shop I worked at)
Maxtor (slow and unreliable)
Quantum (ditto)

Mid Level:

Seagate

Good Drives:

IBM
Western Digital

Every once in a while Western Digital will send out a bad batch, but their customer support is so good you can get recalls in no time flat. Now that WD is a modified IBM (who owns every decent storage patent there is) they are top notch and then some.

Jammrock

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Athlon 650, Biostar board, 128 MB PC133 (Crucial), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, 10/100 NIC, lots of case fans, etc...

[Pace]

Want to here the sound my Fujitsu made when I shorted a couple of wires in my PC?

<font color=#ff0000 size="+7">B O O M !</font>

Also, regarding IBMs - very nice.

As for Tom's hardware, read that DVD to MPEG4 guide - he compares visual quality of the 2 formats and gives us low-quality JPEGs to see what he's talking about, thanks Tom!

Paul.

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