SATA bios settings help.

[powerjas]

Hi all,

 

So I started messing around with my system this weekend ran some benchmarks on the HDD's.

 

I ran HD Tach and HD Tune the results was less then expected. My burst speed on my Samsung SP1614C SATA drives ranged from 98mbs to 105mbs. I do not have these setup in RAID, I just want to have 2 seprate drives. I then ran it on my older system A64 3200+ on a board that uses the VIA K8T800 Pro/VT8237 chipset using PATA WD120BB ATA-100 drives. The older PATA drives were preforming with in +/- 5% of the SATA? I then took one of the SATA drives and put it in the older system and ran the bencmarks on it, and it jumped up to 130 mbs?

 

I have to ask my self do I have some setting in my bios way out of whack, or is the SATA controller's on this board just that bad?

 

My current setting in the bios is as follows.

 

On Board SATA Controller: SATA 1/2

On Board SATA Type: IDE Controller

 

I have also tried the 3114 in non-raid mode and it was awful very very slow. I don't over clock my system the only tweak per say I have done is setting my memory timings instead of auto by spd. Here are my memory settings.

 

mhz: 200

cpc: Enable

cas: 3

trcd: 4

tras: 8

trp: 4

trc: 7

trrd: 2

twr: 2

twtr: 2

tref: 3120

 

rest is default/auto

 

P.S.

I almost forgot S.M.A.R.T. reports the drives as LBA/ATA 133 drives?

[Angry_Games]

well...the Si3112A controller is decent, but the SI3114 controller still sucks pretty badly.

 

but keep in mind the SI3112A is very very old (older than the 3114)

 

check teh Software section for a thread stuck to the top about RAID and hdd benchmarks etc

 

your memory will have nothing to do with your hdd speeds other than if your memory is not configured correctly, you will get all kinds of problems (and hdd speeds will be the least of your probs lol)

[powerjas]

I have skimmed over most of that thread your talking about, I guess my question for the SATA Type, I have 3 choices.

 

1) IDE Controller

2) Raid Controller

3) Other Mass Storage

 

If I set it to 3, I get the 3112 bios screen and, it detect's my drives, then if I have the 3112 drivers installed it will load into windows. Is this the setting I need to be using to take advantage of the SATA, or is IDE Controller the one I want?

[powerjas]

OK, I think I have figgured out what I did wrong. I never loaded the drivers for the SATA controller Windows was seeing it as a Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller. My burst speeds in HD Tach are now in the 115 to 120 range.

[mumixam]

even the 3112 is pretty slow for me, i got 2x 36.7GB raptors in raid0 and i get about 130MB/sec brust and 105MB/sec avg. while other with nvraid get 160+MB/sec brust and 100MB/sec ish avg.

[Jonny Conga]

Hey Powerjas,

 

I've been having SATA troubles too - I found the SB driver from ATI website helped a bit but not totally -

 

can you tell me what drivers you installed? Were they just ones from the driver disc that comes with the MB or ones that came with the SATA HDs?

 

thanks for any help you can give me.

[Angry_Games]

Hey Powerjas,

 

I've been having SATA troubles too - I found the SB driver from ATI website helped a bit but not totally -

 

can you tell me what drivers you installed? Were they just ones from the driver disc that comes with the MB or ones that came with the SATA HDs?

 

thanks for any help you can give me.

I would install the complete ATI package for motherboards with ATI SB chips

 

they include SB drivers, ATI video drivers (since you have an ATI vid card) and the CCC if you wish to have that as well.

[powerjas]

Hey Powerjas,

 

I've been having SATA troubles too - I found the SB driver from ATI website helped a bit but not totally -

 

can you tell me what drivers you installed? Were they just ones from the driver disc that comes with the MB or ones that came with the SATA HDs?

 

thanks for any help you can give me.

 

I'm just running the cat 6.4's off ATI's website.