UDMA 5, UDMA 6 & SATA 150

[desertfox1969]

Folks

I am using Samsung 160 GB Sata 150 Hard Drive with Intel D865PERL motherboard, which says that it support SATA 150, but when I connect it with my system, it says in the BIOS & as well as Device Manager of Windows XP Professional that it is running with UDMA 5, which is ATA 100, that means I am not getting the performance of SATA 150 HDD. How can I enable my SATA HDD to read SATA 150 & get the performance.

Desert Fox

 

[nobly]

There's no way your HDD can put out 100MB/s of bandwidth. Even raptors top out at like 70MB/s. Your 7200rpm HDD is probably out there around 60MB/s.
I wouldn't worry about it too much.

 

[desertfox1969]

Folks

Then, why the HDD Manufacturers say & differentiate UDMA 5, UDMA 6 & SATA 150, as UDMA 5 is ATA 100, transfer 100 MB/s UDMA 6 is ATA 133, transfers 133 MB/s & SATA 150, transfers 1.5GB/s.

Desert Fox

 

[nobly]

Alot of it is marketing numbers.

But there is also usefulness in it as well. Its more so useful for people running multiple HDDs in some RAID configuration.

For example, if you run 2 HDDs in RAID 0, you're going to be looking for ATA133, since lets say each of your HDD's runs at about 60MB/s, for a total of 120MB/s. So at that point you're actually sort of getting close to maxing out 133MB/s ATA133.

For 4 HDD's in RAID 0, you'd have to use 2 IDE controllers (since 1 IDE channel can only support 2 devices), and both of those controllers will have ATA133, so again, you're good.

Now comes SATA. SATA lets you have usually 4 ports per controller. So you can have 4 SATA HDD's sharing 1 SATA controller. Now that an issue, right? If SATA drives run at about 60-65MB/s, we're talking 4 SATA's in a RAID 0, so thats about 240MB/s. Which maxes out the SATA 1 spec (150MB/s). Hence SATA II (300MB/s).

But in reality, if you only have 1 HDD, you won't see much of a difference from ATA100 to ATA133. You won't see much of a difference going from IDE to SATA.

Also SATA 1 is 1.5Gb/s, which is 187MB/s, but there is overhead from SATA, so that brings it down to 150MB/s.

 

[dvdpiddy]

no harddrive can exceed 100 mbps bandwith no harddrive not even sata3.0 maybe the new raptor 150gb can go to 80 mbps

 

[desertfox1969]

Folks

Many thanks for your reply, but the question is, if UDMA 5, 6 & SATA 150 are the accumulated data transfer mode of a single IDE/SATA channel, then why it shows my SATA 150 HDD in BIOS as UDMA 5, why not UDMA 4. or more or less. Moreover why my DVD-ROM shown as UDMA 4.

Desert Fox

 

[nobly]

It also might depend on
1) your motherboard's support of UDMA or
2) when your component was made (the spec for UDMA 4 or UDMA 5)

UDMA 4 is ATA 66MB/s
UDMA 5 is ATA 100MB/s

Your HDD is set to 5 because it can deal w/ more than UDMA 4 provides.
Your DVD drive at max is probably 16x read - 11Mbps*16/8 = 22MB/s
Why isn't your DVD drive less than UDMA 4? Maybe your motherboard doesn't support less than 4. *shrug*

Don't get confused w/ UDMA and SATA - you can't compare these things because they are used for different things in the computer. Its like comparing apples and oranges (to use the overused saying).

 

[Craigmandu]

Answer this question for me...

In your device manager in Windows XP professional.

Open the ide ata/atapi controllers
Is there a "Serial ATA controller" listed there? Sometimes you need to load actual SATA controller drivers for your motherboard before it will show up correctly.

For instance on one of my computers in this section I have 3 entries:

NVIDIA Nforce3 250 Parallel ATA Controller (this is regular IDE/EIDE)
NVIDIA Nforce3 250 Serial ATA Controller (one of the SATA controllers)
NVIDIA Nforce3 250 Serial ATA Controller (the other SATA controller)

If I look at the properties of the SATA controller that has the HDD on it I see this on the "Primary Channel" tab:

Transfer mode: Serial ATA DMA
I then have a "Speed Test" button where you can do a simple data xfer test.

Do you have these options in your device manager?

 

[CAMS]

Do you have these options in your device manager?

Not with Intel D865PERL motherboard.

desertfox1969 stop worrying mine is exactly the same.
The DVD is likely UDMA4 as mine.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Many (especially older) chipsets don't report the UDMA mode properly for SATA drives.

There are only two speeds that SATA can possibly run at, that's 1.5Gb/sec and 3.0Gb/sec. Even though your chipset might report UDMA5, the drive is definitely running at 1.5Gb/sec. There is no other speed option.