Gigabyte P35-DS4 slow SATA performance

[sakoula]

Hi, I just got this motherboard and have a problem with the SATA performance.

So:
My mother board is the P35-DS4 rev 1.0
with a Samsung SP2504C (250GB 7200RPM) connected to the GIGABYTE SATA controller (jmicron).
I am running Windows XP PRO SP3 with all the latest updates on.
On the BIOS I have set it up as both ID or ACHI.
This is my primary disk for booting the OS.

The performance when copying a file will not exceed 25~29 MB/s (either IDE or ACHI).

I have installed all the latest drivers from the gigabyte web site.
On the device manager my drive appears as a SCSI disk device and I cannot enable things like DMA etc.

When having the controller configured on IDE mode (in the BIOS) in the device manager in windows I cannot see any IDE controllers.
When having the controller configured on ACHI mode (in the BIOS) in the device manager in windows I can see the ID controller but no device to be attached on it

I do not want to use the Intel SATA/RAID controller (I am planning for having five disks installed using raid 5).

Can you please help me?

Thanks!

[Psycho101]

Re: Gigabyte P35-DS4 slow SATA performance

Ther JMicron controller is truely aweful. IMO you have no other choice but to use the ICH.

If running a 5 Disk RAID 5 then there will be a port spare for your OS set up as JBOD/Non RAID Member. This isn't going to effect the performance of your RAID array.

Use the Gigabyte Ports for Optical drives only, or better still, disable them al together. They aren't designed to be your Primary Boot Drive location.

[sakoula]

Re: Gigabyte P35-DS4 slow SATA performance

thanks for your reply!!
I really cannot delete the contents of my primary drive right now (the one connected to the JMicron Gigabyte chipset). If I create a raid volume I need to erase it.

I will use your advice once I have another disk to play with.

However in general what should I except from a copy using this disk?
The measurement I got was from teracopy, copying from the Jmicron to the Intel RAID.

thanks again

[Psycho101]

Re: Gigabyte P35-DS4 slow SATA performance

Performance seems to vary depending on the drive connected. The JMicron seems to react to the drive HW much more variedly than the ICH. I have had my WD6400AAKS hooked up to the JMicron and got a lousy 70MB/s sync Read and 45MB/s copy to a slightly newer but still the same AAKS (called Caviar Blue rather than SE16). My SSD is really crippled on the JMicron, barely reaching SATA 1.5 Speeds.

Unfortunately, yes as you say you will need to initialize the disk into the array as JBOD which will destroy the data. because there is no RAID or RAID stripe though, you can use something like Acronis True Image 10 to make a mirror of the disk, then incorporate it nto the RAID as the active boot disk and use the Acronis boot CD to restore the drive to a usable state. This works great.

Being a part time system builder (I do a limited number of PC's by word of mouth mainly) I use Acronis extensively. I have an image of XP, Vista32, Vista64, Win7 Home 32&64 and Win7 Pro 32&64. I use them to image a customers HDD rather than have to do a full install. I then register the OS with the Key from the OS they buy from me (full genuine copies only) and they have a legit install that takes only ~3 minutes rather than 30 min. This method also works for RAID configs, simply point it at the destination JBOD drive, RAID1 or 5 array or RAID0 stripe and the ICH handles the data distribution like any other set of file copies. MBR and Track0 are automatically tweaked by Acronis.