HDD's Speed Questions

[Mortis]

Greetings. I want to point another HDD into a Secondary System for backups only... I am going to format it Fat32 and set it up as a slave. The Master HDD runs at ATA66. This other HDD that I am putting in for storage/backup is ATA33. Will the ATA33 drive limit my ATA66 drive to the slower speed? With the Mobo that is in that box I have to run it on the same cable, but didnt know if the speed would be affected (Kinda like Ram- two dif sticks... one 133 and the other 100- so both default to 100).

Thanks for the Input.

Mortis

[Mortis]

Greetings... I went ahead and put it in thinking that I would run BenchMarks and see what happened. I installed it- the BIOS sees it and identifies it correctly as a PrimarySlave with all information but when I enter windows- it does not see it. What am I missing?

OS is WinME for the time being.

Thanks
Mortis

[jad1097]

Did you format it?

[Mortis]

That was it... THANKS Jad for the Reminder to check that out.
I had really thought it had a valid Fat32 file format on it already. I set it up as Master and it had linux :eek: . Must have been from one of the times I was playing with Linux and I left it on that HDD. I hope I didnt leave it on their for a reason and forget like I forgot it was there... I might be really mad at myself when I find out... LOL.

Going back to my Original question- Performance. The Master Maxtor is a 5400 ATA66. Prior benchmarks with PCMark02 showed a performance rating of around 1050-1100 ish.... that was with WindowsMe/Fat32. I loaded this seconadary HDD in as slave for storage and it is 5400 ata33. While I was at it- I decided to put Win2K on that box with NTFS. I have it setup and running. Benchmarking it showed the HDD rating/score at 686. Will NTFS and background Win2K/services running decrease the score this much or is it a result of adding the ATA33 HDD on the same Ide channel/ribbon as the ATA66 HDD.

Any Thoughts? Does anyone think switching it to Secondary with the Rom will increase the ATA66 performance?

Thanks,
Mortis

EDIT: CPU and Memory scores stayed pretty much the same... only the HDD score changed.

[Mntsnow]

I hope I didnt leave it on their for a reason
Thats what "sticky notes" are for Mortis! :)

I would die without stickynotes!

[jad1097]

"or is it a result of adding the ATA33 HDD on the same Ide channel/ribbon as the ATA66 HDD."


I think that may be the problem. Try to put the other drive on the other channel and see if it performs better. From what I understand most newer chipsets do not have this problem but I really do not know for sure.

[Mortis]

Thats what "sticky notes" are for

LOL... knew I was forgetting something else- its rough getting old!

I switched the Slave IDE to the Secondary Channel- No dif. I did get the performance better by disabling WPF in 2K... it now scores around 725ish in Mark02. I attribute the rest to the NTFS file system, although I have read that differing opinions on whether NTFS is actually slower than Fat32. Strangely- this makes me feel a little better. If anyone recalls, I had many performance questions in tips and tricks about my Seagate 7200 vs the Maxtor 5400. I have managed to tweak that to perform around 1000 ish... that is consistent with the score I now receive with the 5400 using the same file system. THanks all for your comments and assistance!

Hmmm, contemplating going back to Fat32 on both systems- WOW... that would be a LOT of work... LOL.

Thanks,
Mortis

Stickies, must remember stickies... maybe I should write myself a note.

[otheos]

IDE controllers can switch speeds between DMA devices. So since both are DMA capable they should each perform at their rated speeds.

Now given that the primary master is a 5400 ATA66 drive I do not expect it to saturate an ATA33 bus by so much that a misconfigured bus (due to drivers mainl) that forced it to run at ATA33 would cause such a performance loss.

Now the drop in performance is significant, so look in device manager that actually DMA is enabled for BOTH drives. Other than that check that you have proper drivers (Via 4in1 are worse in W2K, use the stock for the IDE controller).