UDMA33 vs ATA66 Revisited

[Slackmaster2K]

About a year ago I posted some numbers on ATA(UDMA)33 vs. ATA66. At that time, with my 7200RPM Maxtor drive, I found absolutely no benefits to ATA66. I was seeing sustained transfer rates in the 27+MB/sec range.
With my 5400RPM Quantum drive, I actually noted a decrease in performance on my ATA/66 controller (a Highpoint HPT366) and was seeing performance under 19MB/sec. A few others on the BBS noted similar results.

Well, I just did a quick test with a brand new IBM 30GB Deskstar 7200RPM drive on an Abit BE6-II motherboard, and found a substantial increase in speed when using the Highpoint ATA/66 controller vs. the standard UDMA/33 controller. The difference was a leap from 27MB/sec to 34MB/sec. In multitrack tests using Dskbench, I saw an increase of over 1MB per second with typical multitracking block sizes. This relates to several more tracks (assuming a hard disk bottleneck).

I'm not sure why exactly I'm seeing these changes, but the 34MB/sec turned in by the IBM drive on the Highpoint would lead me to believe that drives are simply getting faster, which is of course to be expected. With this increase in speed, perhaps the higher peak transfer rates of ATA/66 do help with sustained transfers.

I would be interested if anyone would be so kind as to run some experiments with a newer (literally newer) 7200RPM hard drive and a couple controllers.

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Emeric]

I have an ATA 100 controller card in a box I haven't got around to installing on my BX board. I'll do it this week and let you know the results with a 1.5 year old Quantum 18GB 7200 RPM and a 2 month old Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM drive. Where to I get this software, dskbench?

 

[Slackmaster2K]

If you just search with google for "dskbench" you'll find a few places to download right off the bat.

It's a dos program so you might have to brush up on your command line skills to pipe the results to a file...I think its results are pretty valid though...

Thanks emeric!

Slackmaster 2000

 

[DS_Sultan]

Your command line would be as follows assuming drive c is the subject drive here.

Open a DOS window and type:

dskbench c: > c:\cdrive.txt

This will create the text file called cdrive.txt in the root of the drive for you to open and compare to other drives. For other drives simply replace the c: with D or E or whatever, and change the output file name to ddrive.txt etc...

Note: this test does take some time and since you are redirecting to a file you will not see any screen updates so be patient.

Also, here is the file you need.