SG Broadband Community

Posted: **Tue Jun 12, 2001 6:03 pm**

Promise ULTRA100 TX2 ATA/100 PCI IDE
Does anyone know if these cards are any good?
I'm trying to improve all the little things, thanks....t

__________________
System Specs:
CUSL2C
P3 1 Gig
Hitachi CM-813 21" Monitor
Antec 1030 Case
W2K/Pro
Plextor 8x4x32 CDRW
Panasonic CD/DVD rom
256 Megs Crucial ram

Posted: **Tue Jun 12, 2001 9:55 pm**

well yeah it's good

it's an ATA/100 controller, kinda useless though if you don't have ATA/100 drives however

well actually maybe not, it would add 4 more IDE slots, but if your hard drives are only udma/33 that's all they will go at, and if they are ata/66 that's all they will go at....

Posted: **Tue Jun 12, 2001 10:25 pm**

Thanks Brent, I should have added I have an IBM 40 gig GXP 60 and and a Deskstar 20 gig from my Gateway, but I'm kinda disappointed with the results from PCPitstop:
TIP > Unusually low disk performance
Drive C has an uncached speed of 2.87 megabytes per second.

Drive D has an uncached speed of 2 megabytes per second.

Drive E has an uncached speed of 2.06 megabytes per second.

Drive F has an uncached speed of 1.98 megabytes per second.

Drive G has an uncached speed of 0.87 megabytes per second.

Drive H has an uncached speed of 0.85 megabytes per second.

Drive I has an uncached speed of 0.82 megabytes per second.

For comparison, systems with the same CPU, clock speed, and memory size as this one have an average uncached speed of 3.94 MB/s .

Posted: **Tue Jun 12, 2001 10:42 pm**

hmmm....... well i know the IBM 60GXPs are extremely fast... i have 2 of them (though they are in RAID 0, i did some tests before i configured the array), and they can sustain 40MBps (peak sustained. not all the way across the platters. then again, no drive sustains its peak all the way across).

thats wicked fast for IDE. there may be a configuration problem. if i were you, i would d/l SiSoft Sandra from http://www.tweakfiles.com , and HDTach 2.61 from http://www.tcdlabs.com . sometimes certain benchmarks dont like or report false readings with some configurations.

i would get a second or third benchmark's "opinion" before investing money (when it may not really be needed).

Posted: **Tue Jun 12, 2001 11:03 pm**

Thanks Smaier, tha sandra benchmark was "24530" for the "C" drive. That's as far as I went....t

Posted: **Tue Jun 12, 2001 11:52 pm**

no problay-mo.

for kicks, i would still pick up and run HDTach. it actually plots the throughput across the platters for you (in the form of a graph), rather than just giving you a number.

which actually brings up something. since some of the partitions may be located in physically different areas of the platters, there would be a sustained read/write throughput difference that would/could vary greatly from the peak for the drive. like more towards the center of the platters.... where the actual speed at which the clusters pass under the head at a much slower speed than at say.... more towards the outer edges of the platters).

anyways, i really like the data HDTach gives you. CPU usage, burst speeds, etc. SiSoft is a great all-in-one, and is unmatched in some areas, but HDTach is better for hdd tests (IMO).