Falsely Recognised SATA HDDs

[nephilim666]

I have just purchased and put together the following components:-

ASUS P4PE SATA/RAID Motherboard
Intel IV 3,06 Northwood
2 x 512MB Samsung DDRAM PC333 CL2.5 16ch
2 x Seagate Barracuda SerialATA V 80GB ST380023/13AS
ATX-Netzteil PFC ProSilence(Goldedition)420W

Motherboard ASUS P4PE Rev 1.03 MoBo Bios REV 1005
Onboard Promise SATA/RAID controller PDC20376 BIOS 1.00.0.21

WIndows XP Pro
Driver version for RAID=Promise FastTrak 376/378 Version 1.0.1450.25
All BIOS settings concerning RAM, CPU, AGP and FSB speeds have been left at default ( I hav'nt started fiddling yet )

I have connected the 2 HDDs to the onboard SATA connectors with the appropriate cables and configured it as STRIPE 0. I was bitten with the RAID bug by my last ( and still running ABIT KG7/RAID 2 x IBM DTLA 307030 system AMD 1700+ ) because I like the speed when I am shovelling big .mpg files around.

Now my question is:-

on my new machine, that seems to be working fine, I have looked into the PROMISE Fast Build Utility which appears shortly after the POST and it shows my HDDs as running as UDMA 5. I installed the PAM programme from PROMISE and it also confirmed that the HDDs were being correctly identified but set at UDMA 5. I have been in contact with SEAGATE and although they answered extremely fast they were not able too help me and referred me to PROMISE who pointed out that they give no help for OEM solutions who pointed me too ASUS who give no help whatsoever ( experience I have had with a V7700 Graphics card ) Correct me if I am wrong but UDMA 5 means ( theoretically ) that my HDDs are running at 100 mbs UDMA 6 133mbs and SATA should be ( once again theoretically ) 150mbs.

Has anyone else a similar setup ( I know Harald7 does and I have asked him in another thread ) and could they tell me what their FastTrak Setup Utility ( appears after POST ) tells them.


I thank you in advance for any information or advice that you can give me.

[sixf00t4]

welcome to Techimo!

i wish i could answer your questions, but all i know how to do is give you a bump

[Harold7]

nephilim666

I found this article at Tom's Hardware http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage...204/index.html which will explain the performance issues with the Seagate SATA drives and various controller options.

My Raid array shows U5 as well, but as you'll read in the article, UDMA 5 performance is normal in this first generation SATA HD/RAID Contoller setup with the Seagate drives.

True SATA 1 transfer rates (150MB/sec) are probably still a ways off in the future.

I found this site http://www.iol.ie/~padraiga/speeds which has a pretty comprehensive list of data for HD performance standards.

If you run the SI Sandra File System tests, you can compare your results with the various HD types the benchmarks show... I rechecked my results and I get 43,495 MB/sec with my Raid array, which to me is pretty good performance, though to be honest I knew up front when I bought my Seagate SATA drives, that the best performance I was likely to see was ATA100 at best.

[nephilim666]

Well Harald maybe I will get some sleep tonight although I find it kind of annoying that after paying good money for these discs that they do not substantially increase my data transfer rate. Is this a software or a hardware thing?

I suppose I will have to wait and see what the future brings.

I would still be interested in what other users with this system configuration are seeing. I will benchmark with Sandra and see what comes up.

Thanks once again.

[nephilim666]

After defragging my C: partition I ran Sandra and was surprised to see the number 53172 which is well over what I expected. According to Sandra this is a higher rate than a U320 SCSI sytem. I really don't place too much trust in benchmarking.

Also I have the side of the case off and the Seagate SATA V HDDs seem very hot, is this normal? My IBM DTLA 307030 ( 2 running as RAID 0 ) discs in my other machine never get this hot.

[kauferlie]

I have the exact same SATA drive on my P4PE, and Windows XP claims not to detect a H.drive in the system (eventhough I can access and write to the drive via the command line).

I ran Seagate's discwizard, and yet XP doesn't see the drive.

Can you explain how you installed yours?

[Harold7]

kauferlie

Exactly what SATA setup do you have?

Do you also have IDE drives connected?

I have 2 Seagate 120 GB SATA drives in Raid 0 with no IDE HDs installed.

Make sure you have the Promise controller enabled in the ASUS bios setup.

Do you have an SATA RAID setup or some combo of SATA/IDE drives?

Is your OS on the SATA drive (s) or on IDE?

[kauferlie]

...................The Seagate SATA is my first and only drive in this brand new system.

[Harold7]

You might try entering your motherboards Raid utility and try setting up a single disk Raid 0 array... it does work BTW, the ASUS documentation for using SATA drives is pretty slim and I suspect that in order to use a single SATA drive in a system with this MB, you have to build a single disk Raid array so the Promise controller has something to see.

When you installed your OS on the new Seagate SATA drive did you hit F6 to install the SATA controller driver when asked by WIN XP setup or did you use Ghost or some other program to copy an existing image file of an OS to the HD?

Did you enable the SATA controller in the P4PE bios?

[kauferlie]

Promise is enabled on mobo.

BTW I was under the impression that 1 SATA drive should be fine, especially since SATA eliminates that whole master-slave situation of IDE.

As far as ASUS support on this issue, btw, they are at a loss, which is ridiculous. They have been emaling me worthless info for over 2 weeks now.

[Harold7]

How about the other info... did you do a clean in stall of XP?

As an aside, why is your OS looking for your SATA drive as "H" if you only have one HD in your system... just exactly what is your hardware configuration anyway?

When you installed XP did the setup procedure tell you to hit F6 to install the Promise drivers?

In Device manager do you show anything listed under Disk Drives or can you even get into XP at bootup?

In your Bios try setting the boot device order as floppy, CD/DVD, then SCSI device, then IDE.

One SATA drive should work fine, just out of curiosity, try my suggestion of entering the FastBuild Utility during bootup and setting up a Raid 1+0 array, then do a clean install of XP and see if everything works that way... make sure you copy the Promise drivers to a floppy so you can hit F6 when XP setup asks for them.

[kauferlie]

Thanks for the help; the problem was the Promise controller, apparently, as you hinted.
I confirmed this:

I bought a SATA PCI card. Installed it, connected the SATA drive to it, and XP installed like a charm.

When I went to Device Manager, the Promise controller had the yellow exclamation point. I right-clicked it, and chose Update driver. It requested the mobo CD, and Promise controller came up.

Then I disconnected the SATA drive cable from the SATA PCI card, and connected the cable to Promise's onboard interface, and all worked. (I returned the SATA PCI card).

Thanks bunches

[Harold7]

Glad I could be of assistance getting you up and running... good luck playing with your new toy.

[Kelsiph]

I haven't searched around but don't want to miss this good thread. I have the same problem Kauferlie has, where I have a Asus P4PE mobo and have that promise sata onboard raid controller and have a single WD Raptor SATA HD. I'm assuming I need the driver disk for it to work. But where would I be able to find that. I tried pressing F6 while doing a fresh install of WinXP, but I have no disk and it cant recognize the drive or controller.

What Promise Raid controller does the P4PE come with anyways? I can't seem to find it. Also, I bought this HD recently and before I had a normal IDE HD, if I would like to connect that also at a later time just for data storage purposes, how would I go about doing so? Just connect it to the Primary IDE channel as a Master? or which would be ideal?

Thanks in advance!

[revenga]

Hey Kelsiph,

Asked myself the same question yesterday. Ended up finding it on the CD that came with my ASUS A7N8x Deluxe MOBO. If you look around the folders, you might find one called drivers, under that a subfolder named SATA or something similar. In there, you might find .inf, .sys etc. files. Copy all of those (minus massive PDFs, naturally, but including one called textsetup.oem, all the small ones basically) onto a floppy and hit F6 during setup. Then hit S to supply the driver and put the floppy in. That took care of it for me, windows detects a device and you can select it to continue setup.

Problem is.... after formatting, which went great, Windows started copying files, when suddenly the BSOD hit me with a IRQ_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL error that proves fatal. I think this must be a IRQ conflict problem, not sure. My next move tonight will be to disable as much of the other onboard periphery (theres a lot on the deluxe) as possible via BIOS, to install them once windows is running. Hope that works.

Anyway, hope you dont run into that problem.