Originally posted by Outback Jack
One more question.
Since 98se has been working I've been using that for now. But when I copy files onto the hard drive, the transfer rate seems pretty slow. Really not much faster than a standard HD. It takes 3 1/2 minutes to transfer 2 1/2 gigs between partitions. I did the math and that comes out to less than 13 megs per second. SATA claims 150megs/sec. I've installed the sata drivers in windows. Is there anthing else I can do?
And is there a utility that can tell me the exact data transfer rate for the hard drives?
I am tempted to exhale and "oh dear god man", but as you are a newbie, I will give you a brief rundown on how drives work.
NO drives achieve sustained data transfer at the interface rate (150mb/s for SATA, 100mb/s for ata4), the drives simply cannot present data to the heads fast enough, that and most sata drives are actually just ATA4 drives with an SATA interface, which actually slows them down. Indeed, IDE is still not a serious performer in terms of sustained speed, that is the sole domain of modern SCSI drives (although, SATA does promise to allow IDE drives to rival SCSI speeds, when they start to produce reasonably sized 10k and 15k rpm SATA drives). The rotational speed of a drive and, to a much lesser extent, number of heads and width of data bus determines its maximum sustained data transfer speed, which is always significantly lower than its "burst" speed.
The speed rate is for burst transfer out of cache. Furthermore, you said "data from one partition to another", ie ON THE SAME DISK. Therefore, ignoring overheads from the OS (in windows, file system OS is massive, particularly for NTFS which has a ridiculous number of indices), your drive must first READ and then WRITE the same data to the disk, even if your move was so perfectly syncronised as to read the data from one head when another was perfectly positioned to write it (all but impossible), your drive would be operating at HALF of its possible sustained transfer rate; most likely it will be much less so. However, if you were moving the data to the same partition, it would appear "instantaneous" as the OS doesn't move the data, merely updates indexes so the data appears to be elsewhere on the filesystem.
So, unless you have a 10k rpm SATA drive, no hope whatsoever of achieving a high data transfer rate (I wouldnt plan on exceeding 40mb/s sustained data transfer from any IDE drive, although the SATA data bus should allow this to improve, I havent seen better than 40mb/s sustained from an IDE drive would be more accurate a statement).
I recommend googling for some more nfo on drive technology if you are really interested in understanding it; but it helps to think about what is physically occuring in the operation when you are trying to form judgements relating to speed/performance.
err!
jak.
ps: I didnt know small places like texas had outbacks, down here we have farms the size of texas in the outback
