Weird transfer rates with new drive

[timwhit]

I have 3 IDE drives in my system for mass storage. I just added a Maxtor Plus 9 160GB drive and I had to hook it up to the onboard Promise fasttrak133 'Lite' controller. I decided to bench all three ide drives using ATTO to see what kind of transfer rates the new drive could do. The other drives are hooked to the onboard Via controller. I can't remember what southbridge my motherboard has, but it is an Asus A7V333.

Anyways check out these screenshots and let me know what you think the deal is with the slow writes I am getting with the new Maxtor.

Maxtor Plus 9 7200 8MB 160GB

Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB

Western Digital 1000BB

The system is running Win2k with SP4 and all other updates added. All drives have data on them, but this usually doesn't change ATTO results one way or another. The drive are not full, at most half full. I have another Promise controller around here somewhere which supports ATA133 drives and is not the stupid RAID version, if someone thinks that I will get better transfer rates with this card then I will try it out.

 

[JMP]

That sounds like the infamous SCSI Bug in Win XP / Win 2K (SP3 introduced it) The Promise card is seen as a SCSI device I Believe

CAS wrote a Filter that fixed it (forced on Write Cache) search on SR

 

[blakerwry]

I've had good results with the built in windows/microsoft fastrack drivers. The promise ones seem to suck lately to be honest.


Make sure you have the newest BIOS for your motherboard (sot hat your fastrack BIOS is up to date) and see if win2k has drivers that support the fastrack by reinstalling the controller(may have to select from a list and not auto).

 

[blakerwry]

or just "update drivers" for the controller and select a different driver if available.

 

[CougTek]

Shut down any SETI@home / Folding@home / distributed compting program and re-reun ATTO. I know FAH lowers the transfer rate for small files significantly under ATTO.

 

[timwhit]

Shut down any SETI@home / Folding@home / distributed compting program and re-reun ATTO. I know FAH lowers the transfer rate for small files significantly under ATTO.

I shut off SETI@home and the small block transfer rates got a lot better. It still didn't fix the problem with the new Maxtor drive having terrible writes.

Does anyone have a link to the utility that Cas wrote? Maybe I will try it out.

 

[timwhit]

I tried out the utility that Cas wrote and it greatly improves write speeds. Has anyone here used this utility at all? Has anyone had any problems related to data loss?

 

[timwhit]

I tried out the utility that Cas wrote and it greatly improves write speeds. Has anyone here used this utility at all? Has anyone had any problems related to data loss?

I spoke too soon. The driver doesn't help the new Maxtor's transfer rates at all. It greatly helped my Cheetah 36ES' write speeds, but the Maxtor which is hooked up to the onboard Promise controller is unaffected by Cas' driver.