New harddrive question

W

Waysid

New member
I have a quick question for anyone who has installed a new hard drive specifically for holding audio data.

First a little background:
I have just purchased a 7200rpm 30gb Quantum Fireball drive to use as my audio data cd. I installed it as the second master on my Gigabyte board with Via chipset (GA-6VXE7+). I formatted the drive with the /Z :64 option to get 32K clusters and I believe I have the dma and bus mastering options all setup correctly. So here's my question/problem:

I don't see much improvement over my old Fujitsu 5400 20GB hard drive. When I do bench tests on the two drives (using dskbench from prorec.com) the results are as follows: with a 256K files the 5400 drive is reading at approx. 11 mb/s while the 7200 is reading at approx. 10 mb/s. The 5400 drops off much faster as the filesizes drop ( 6 mb/s at 128, 4 mb/s at 64 etc) while the 7200 is much more consistantly at 6 mb/s for all smaller files. Is the best I can hope for? I guess i was expecting the new drive, with 32K clusters, to provide better numbers.

Any comments....I feel like I have wasted my money.

Thanks
Chris

PS. The whole reason I bought a new drive was that Cakewalk would quit playback periodically when I have lots of tracks playing and I figured it was cause the drive wasn't fast enough. Plus I figured if I get a new sound card that allows recording of 4 tracks simultaneously then I would need a faster drive.
 
Thanks for the response ola.

Its a Gigabyte with Via chipset. The exact model is GA-6VXE7+.

Does that shed any light?

I am getting very low CPU usage results when I am doing the benchmarkin on dskbench so it does seem like the bus mastering is working.
 
I'm sorry. I completly missed that you had already written the make and model of your mobo in your first post. Duh. The mobo is most likely not a bottleneck in your case.

I think diskbench is a bit too kind in it's testing and that you'll see a difference of the number of tracks you can actually use with oyur new disc because the constant jumping beteween the tracks, to read and write is quicker on your new disk.
 
Those numbers are half of what they should be. You should see around 20-25MB/sec read and write rates with the average 7200RPM drive....although this varies a lot. With my 30GB 7200RPM Maxtor I get 15-18mb/sec writes and 30-35Mb/sec reads (yeah, 35) in dskbench, which averages out nicely.

The rates you are reporting seem to be those of a 5400RPM drive. Find and post the exact model number and where you purchased the drive. I have seen hard drive numbers listed incorrectly numerous times at numerous stores (online & retail). If you purchased the drive OEM then there's a chance you didn't get what you thought you got.

Otherwise you might not have the drive setup correctly. What kind of CPU usage you seeing? It should be less than 5%....

Slackmaster 2000
 
I bought the drive OEM at a local computer store here in Vancouver. I noticed the drive didn't say it was a 7200 on it but the salesman definitely sold me it as such. I guess will have to pull it back out my computer to get the exact model number off the drive. As for my CPU usage rates they were all below 3% and in some cases the were actually negative (which doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense). Anyway thanks for the responses and hopefully the model number will shed some light.

Chris
 
From another post of mine:

Only thing I recommend is keep an eye out for new VIA 4in1 drivers. That is the chipset driver package. When you install the 4in1 update it detects which exact chipset you have and installs the appropriate updates.

I think the latest version is 429.

You can download the drivers at:

http://www.via.com.tw/drivers/index_new2.htm


Also, you are right that the only way to check that your HD is 7200 is to get the exact model number of the drive and compare it. Quantum was recently purchased by Maxtor, so Quantum drive info is now available at:

http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm
 
Thanks again for the help.

I pulled the drive out and verified it is indeed a Quantum Fireball Plus AS drive. I tried getting the latest 4-in-1 via drivers but it didn't seem to make a difference. Just for fun I tried unchecking the DMA box for the harddrive and the transfer rate plummeted in dskbench to below 5mb/s...instead of the normal 12 so some sort of DMAing is happening. One thing I noticed was that my motherboard supports Ultra DMA 33/ATA 66...while the Fireball is listed as having a ATA 100 interface. The specs on the fireball seem to suggest though that it should still work fine on ATA 66.

Is there anything I could have missed when installing the drive? BIOS settings? Anything that could be preventing my bus from operating in ATA66 mode.

Chris
 
Interesting new development.

While continuing to pull my hair out - I tried changing a few settings in my BIOS to see if it would make any difference. Well I Enabled "HDD S.M.A.R.T." and booted into windows. I tried running dskbench on the new drive and it reported back read/write speeds of over 16 mb/s so I though ok maybe its finally working..but then I checked my 5400 and it reported 16 mb/s as well. So now I am completely confused again...

Slackmaster - you had some insight before .... does any of these new developments ring in any bells.

The worst part about all this crap is that I am obsessing over this and not making any music :(
 
Have you tried setting the drive to anything else than secondary master? Do you have anything else on the secondary channel, like an old CD player? Maybe that limits the speed of the transfer. Try putting the drive as primary slave and the CD as secondary master and see if that does the trick.

Do you have the latest BIOS version? I think it's version "Fa" from March 21. this year.

/Ola
 
Are you sure it's a Fireball Plus AS and not a Fireball lct20?

If the drive truely is 7200RPM, then you're getting PIO transfer rates. What have you done to ensure that DMA transfer is enabled? (I believe it is from the CPU numbers you reported)

Also, are you using an 80pin ATA cable or a regular IDE cable? If you are using a regular IDE cable then the drive might not be running in the correct mode (assuming it sets itself up automatically).

Slackmaster 2000
 
Slack beat me to my thought as I was reading this. If you are using a standard 40 pin IDE cable the drive will either not work or will run in 33 mode. If you use the 80 pin cable it will run in 66 mode, since that is the best your motherboard will support.

You can purchase a ATA100 controller card from Promise for about $40. Only problem I have with them is they work only via windows drivers, i.e. if you boot up from a floppy (like you would if your system crashed or was virus crippled) any drives on the card are invisible. For most people this is not a big deal.

Check your drive model carefully, I have noticed a number of drive makers (Maxtor, IBM) were recently clearing out drives which were ATA 100 but only 5400 rpm. These drives are fine for most users but you really want 7200rpm for audio recording.
 
Thanks again everyone....I feel like I am making some progress. I am positive that the drive is a true Quantum Fireball Plus AS and pretty confident I am using the right IDE cable. At the time I bought the HD I didn't know the difference between IDE cables but the clerk asked if I wanted the standard one or a high speed one. I chose the high speed one.

I am also fairly confident that I do have bus mastering enabled. In system/devices/hard disk controller etc. I do see a VIA PCI BUS MASTERING driver and I have made sure that the drive has the DMA options ticked off.
Plus all of my CPU usage results in dskbench show values of usually below 2%.

I will try running the new drive as a slave on my primary controller to see if that makes any difference. I guess the next step after that would be to buy another IDE cable and make sure that it is a ATA66 cable. If all that fails I guess I will look into getting a ATA100 card but I am worried that I'll just keep shelling out money for no improvement.

I still find it a bit weird that enabling the HDD S.M.A.R.T. option in the bios gave me about 5 mb/s more on both my drives.

Thanks for sticking with me on this problem.

Chris
 
Oh...I guess one question I haven't really asked is.

Is there anyway to tell if I am using ATA33 or ATA66 or IP0? Is there anyway to tell if the IDE cable I am using is an 80 pin cable?
 
Both the 80 pin and 40 pin cables have have a 40 pin connector at the ends. However on a 40 pin cable you can literally count 40 "bands" (seperated wires) in the cable while on the 80 cable they are almost too small to count (two wires going to each connector).

Also with the 40 pin cable it makes no difference where on the cable you physically put put the drive, so long as they are properly master/slave jumpered and pin 1 (the red strip) is properly lined up everywhere. With the 80 pin cable the master device is supposed to be at one end, the slave in the middle, and the controller at the other end.

Also, some motherboards have only one ATA66 controller (the primary) while the other is a 33, because that is all you need for non-hard drive IDE devices like CD-ROMS. Most newer boards I have seen have twin 66 or 100 controllers. Check the manual.
 
I happened to notice that you said that your DMA options were "ticked off." I'm not sure if this means that they're on, off, or angry. :) The DMA box should be checked.

When you boot the machine, the BIOS screen should say something about the hard drive...well, it may or it may not I guess. You might see something like HD1, 20GB, UDMA4. The UDMA4 (or UDMA2, or PIO) is what to look for...it specifies the mode the drive is operating in at the hardware level.

RWhite gave you good info in regards to the cables. Basically your hard drive cable should not look the same as your CDROM cable. It should have twice as many visible "ridges" (wires) and be very thin. Even if the drive is running in UDMA/33 mode though, you should still be seeing better numbers...

Hmmm. Post the drive's exact model number from the label.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Still trying things but here is the latest.

I am definitely using 80wire cables...(I counted them :) plus they are colour coded as apparently all the highspeed ones are ). I do definitely have the dma master set up correctly and the drives are enabled for DMA.

I have verified again that I have a Fireball AS Plus 30.0 (7200rpm) and a Fujitsu MPF3204AT (5400) 20.4 GB. The fireball is ATA100 and the Fujitsu is ATA66. My mobo is defintely ATA 33/66 on both ide controllers.

I have tried switching around the order of my drives:
- Fireball primary master, Fujitsu primary slave,
- Fujitsu primary master, Fireball primary slave

and so on. I haven't tried putting the Fireball as primary master and the Fujitsu as primary slave but all the other configurations gave the same results.

Fireball writes: 17.6mb/s reads 16 mb/s
Fujitsu writes: 15 mb/s reads 16 mb/s

I am starting to think that this is as good as I am going to get with an ATA66 mobo. Maybe the Fireball just can't put up the big numbers with 66 interface. I guess I will try and get an ATA100 pci ide controller card at some point if I can't figure anything new out.

One more question: I am thinking about getting a Delta44 sound card and I want to be able to record 4 24bit tracks at once. What sort of disk write speed would I need to reliably do that?

Thanks again...I learning a lot from all this which I can hopefully pass on to others. (I helped some guy on the Cakewalk board with a similar problem so that was cool :)

Chris
 
The Quantum should be putting up numbers over 20Mb/sec on both a 33 and 66Mb/sec controller. These burst speed specifications don't necessarily have a lot to do with overall sustained transfer.

Something is odd and I would look towards the motherboard/controller. Via chipsets are often problematic. Be sure to flash your BIOS as updates become available. Also, you might try the drive on somebody else's machine. If it puts up poor numbers on that machine, then maybe you should exchange the drive. It might be adequate, but you might as well get your money's worth.

Yes you should be able to do 4 24bit tracks at once at 48khz. 96khz operation is touchy, especially with the Delta, I've found. But the benefits of doing 48 outweigh those at 96 in my opinion...better plugin compatibility, better performance, considerably smaller files.

24bit = 3 bytes * 48,000 samples per second = 144Kb / sec per track theoretically. If dskbench is showing numbers at around 4-6MB/sec sustained then I think you'll be fine recording 4 simultaneous 24/48 tracks while playing back maybe twice that many. That's a conservative estimate as there are so many factors involved...processor, memory, overall motherboard/chipset efficiency, software efficiency, plugins, machine setup, etc etc.

Slackmaster 2000
 
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