Hi there! I have purchased the Ultra100 only last week, and am having problems benchmarking my HDDs. My Quantum lct20 (40G,7,200) scored only slightly higher in Sandra 2001se, at an index around 14000, while my Quantum CX (10G, 5400) scored worse than before at less than 13000. The benchmarking took ages to complete, and Ghost 5.1d pauses for about 30sec before it goes into the partition details. I suspect it is the driver set up, as when I tried a fresh installation the Ghost problem was not there, even though Sandra 2001 still took too long (more than 20 min). Both HDD are hooked up to IDE1 on the PRomise using the supplied cable. I have 2 CD ROMS on the on board IDE1, nothing on the IDE2s.

I have Win98SE, Celeron 566@850 (8.5 x 100), 512MB RAM (2xPC100, 2xPC133), Abit BX6 2.0 (440BX). The Promise is using IRQ10 by itself. I have flashed the Promise BIOs with the latest on www.promise.com, and have installed the latest driver.

Any light you can shed on this will be much appreciated!!

First off, this needs to be in the Hardware category, and not site feedback. It'll get moved anyway, so don't worry about that.

You should probably split up your hard drives. Put the second hard drive on IDE2 on the Promise card. Each channel is limited in its available bandwidth (Both bursting and sustained copy). You're not gonna ever get 100MBps with ATA, but at least it'll let you get higher speeds than you would with ATA-33.

__________________
"And knowing is half the battle!"

Forgive my lack of knowledge on the speed-differences w/ ata/udma HD's...

I've heard quite often that ATA/100 hard drives will very rarely see speeds near 100.. but can it be said that they ARE generally higher than UDMA/66? (I ask, cause I noticed you said there was a speed jump from 33.. but you didn't mention 66.)

Thanks...

Ryan

Yes and no. On average, I think I've seen about 8 MB/s on ATA33 of sustained throughput, with usual bursts around 24MB/s. With ATA66, increase that to about 16 MB/s and 40MB/s. ATA100? Prolly around 20-24 MB/s and 70MB/s. This is, of course, provided that your HD can keep up. As you can see, the throughput isn't nearly totally utilised. That's what makes IDE-RAID such an attractive option. With most IDE equipment, you're dealing with about 20% efficiency. IDE-RAID takes that up to 40%. There's almost no speed penalty for it.
On the other hand, SCSI uses less system resources, and typically reaches 80% of it's maximum available bandwidth in sustained output.

Wow.. thanks very much for the overview.. very helpful. That's exactly what I was wondering..

Ryan

Thanks for the tips and info.

I have since tried the following:

1. Re-install Windows 98SE completely and the drivers. Everything worked fine, including Ghost, but the performance is still not as good as I'd hoped (13000+ for my ata66 and 14300+ for the ata100, Sandra 2001 scores). One problem is that I don't want to re-install everything (esp stupid IE5.5 with its interactive updates).

2. Keep the existing Windows 98SE, REMOVE the driver for the Promise card, and Ghost worked ok, but the benchmarks sucked, especially for the ata66, which limped at around 9000.

I am seriously considering re-installing the whole thing (arrgh!), and will try and find a second Ultra cable at a good price!