200A5 Hard Drive Speed

[flecrone]

The speed of my VPR's hard drive has always been acceptable, but never impressive. Running an hdd speed test, I got much better results on a Compaq computer with the same drive than I did on my VPR.

I decided to upgrade to a Hitachi drive, 60GB, 7200 RPM. I was expecting far better results on speed tests, but see only very minor improvement.

Running HD Tach, available for free at http://www.tcdlabs.com, I get a maximum read speed of only 24.9 MB/s. If any of you have time, could you run this on your computers as well and post the results? I think I should be getting a much higher value, so if anyone has any suggestions about what can be tweaked, please let me know!

Thanks!

[spankers]

One of the limiting factors on speed in the 185/200 is the ALi (Acer Labs) M5229 IDE controller. It runs the IDE bus at 33MHz (vice 100 or 133 with the latest generation) UDMA 2. I've upgraded the HDD on my 185A5 to a Toshiba MK-6022GAX... 60 gig w/ 16 MB buffer. My readings are as follows (under linux):

hermes:/home/eherr# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1208 MB in 2.01 seconds = 601.98 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 56 MB in 3.02 seconds = 18.56 MB/sec

There is only so much you can do to improve your IDE performance with this controller. The reason I got the Toshiba was the buffer (16MB vice 2MB in the stock HDD) which definately improves response time for reads and writes.

Cheers,
Ed

[geekrock99]

what about the heat issue? does it seems to get a little better? i personally don't have a speed issue with my stock harddrive.
It's a toshiba mk3018GAP btw.
cheers.

[flecrone]

Spankers:
So all drives are limited to performing like older Ultra DMA 2 AGA 33 drives? That's kind of depressing. Actually, though, I haven't had any real problems with speed, it just seems like it could be better, and I wanted to make sure that there wasn't something I could change to boost performance even more.

[flecrone]

geekrock99:
It's hard to say about the heat. The front left still gets warm, but MAYBE not quite as hot as before. Since the heat level varies a lot with the load on the computer, it's tough to say if, overall, there is a reduction in heat.

Although the benchmarks show only a slight boost in performance, the computer feels faster in actual use. This might be due largely to the increase in HDD cache (8MB on my drive). And having the extra GB of space on board is nice as well.

I've also found a few unexpected bonuses with the new Hitachi drive. Using Feature Tools, you can adjust the acoustic level of the drive. I've set it to the quietest setting. This seems to have little affect on performance, while making drive operation almost inaudible. If the computer fan is on, you can't hear the hard disk at all. Even with the fan off, you have to listen carefully to hear the access noise. The drive light flashes, but you hear nothing. Very cool.

There is also an advanced power management setting. I'll be testing this out next month on a trip to the US. Hopefully, it will yield a bit more battery life.

Overall, though, I'm not convinced the upgrade was worth it. 20GB of extra HDD space is certainly nice, as is the quieter performance. But in terms of speed and heat, I can't say there is vast improvement. However, the upgrade process itself is a real chore. You have to remove nearly two dozen screws and disconnect four cables just to get the drive out. The computer looks like road kill during the process. Compared with other computers I've seen, which have an access door to the drive so you can pop it right out, the process with the VPR is just way to complex. But, at least the drive is upgradable.

BTW, where did these "Techonfile blackbelt" ratings come from?

[spankers]

flecrone:
I don't believe there is anything that can be done from a hardware perspective... however, there may be filesystem tweaks that will increase apparent speed (e.g., cache size, flush time... blah, blah). These types of tweaks will improve your "seat of the pants" speed but will not improve sustained read/write speed to the drive. Under normal use (whatever that is) most users write and read a moderate number of small files to the drive and this is where you see the biggest improvement with caching tweaks. Reading or writing large (say 50+ MB) files or manipulating a large number of smaller files will typically use up your buffer space and at that point your performance is limited to how much data you can shove through the controller to the physical media... and unfortunately our IDE controller is not the best in this regard.

If I am not mistaken, the HDD you have comes with a 16MB buffer. This won't substantially help performance with sustained disk activity (such as booting), but should help a great deal while after booting when working with documents, multimedia stuff (ripping mp3's), etc.

All in all I am pretty happy with the 185. It was cheap, has a pretty display, and does a fine job running Debian.

[flecrone]

Spankers:
The new HDD has an 8MB buffer. I can't really complain about the speed at which my VPR operates, and it certainly does perform well for me. However, I'm getting much higher HDD benchmarks on an NEC sub-notebook with a Crusoe 600MHz processor and a 5400 rpm 40 MB drive. So, it's frustrating to think I have an overall great computer with much more potential, being held back by a poor choice in master bus controllers. I feel like the must be some setting, driver update, etc., that will instantly bring the IDE performance up to modern standards. If only ...

[Nimbus]

there is, just push the vpr matrix button 5 times, and a dialog box will pop up saying " would you like to increase your performance to modern standards" Just click yes, and enjoy!!!


Kidding btw...Have a good night

[JimHub]

I wanted to use my A200 to edit home videos. The internal HD has never been able to perform well enough - dropped frames, etc. I got an external firewire dirve, and it has no problem with real-time video rendering.

Bottom Line: The internal hard drive is great for documents and such, but otherwise is not usable for the IDE controller issue mentioned previously. I'm glad there is the firewire alternative, if you want to spend the $$$.

[Madgenius]

Are you guys sure about these controller limits?
I see in the BIOS and in windows device manager the stock hard drive is running in DMA 5 mode under tests I do get a burst from 80+ to over 100MB/s the results from my HD Tach test were 21MB/s. thats the 40gig 4200, if felcrone gets 24.9 thats over a 15% improvement in sustained data rates. Not bad at all. I remember upgrading from 5400 to 7200 drives on my desktop years back and I have some WD 5400's outperform or match the 7200's.

All PC upgrades are in small increments right now, thats the industry wide problem. a p4 2gig isn't twice as fast as a p3 1gig. I have a 15,000 rpm SCSI U320 drive on my workstation that'll get about 60-70MB/s sustained, thats not twice as fast a the 7200 ide drives I had before running at 45MB/s. For a laptop if we can get close to 30MB/s we should be happy campers.

I just did some digging, and it seems the M5229 controller supports ATA133. I'll keep going and see if i can find out more.

[solgae1784]

The IDE controller does operate at Ultra DMA mode 5, which is ATA100. There is no controller limit. Go to Control panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers -> Right click Primary IDE Channel -> Properties -> Advanced Settings if you don't believe me.

I agree with Madgenius that going from 4200rpm to 7200rpm won't be so dramatic. The real life transfer rate is much more slower. And yes, sometimes 5400rpm drives can beat 7200rpm drives if it's well made enough.

[flecrone]

Device manager does indeed show Ultra DMA 5, but the results of the hard drive read speed don't seem to reflect this.

On an NEC subnotebook with a Transmetta 600MHz CPU and a 40GB, 5400 RPM Travelstar drive, the transfer mode is listed as simply "Ultra DMA", but I get a maximum read speed of 46, compared to 24.9 on the VPR with the newer 60GB 7200 RPM drive. Hibernate data saving and loading are noticeably faster on the NEC, even taking into account the differences in RAM (320MB on the NEC vs. 512MB on the VPR).

So, spankers comments about the IDE bus seem to make sense, although what doesn't make sense is why any company would limit a computer in this way. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have a great impact on system speed once everything is up and running.

Also, I've found that testing under Windows 2000 on the same computer, I get results that are 5% to 10% better. I have many of the visual features of XP turned off, so I don't know if OS overhead would account for the difference.

Finally, just to confirm, is it standard to have PIO for the transfer mode for the CD drive on the VPR? Seems like that should be DMA as well.

[Madgenius]

yep the cd drive should be DMA mode 2. it looks like you may have a proprietary driver on the NEC felcrone. My wireless used to give me a signal reading (Excellent to very low), before I installed a 3rd party connection manager. Now I only get one reading, EXCELLENT, regardless of the true signal being weak. I wouldn't trust those readings that sounds a little too good to be true for a 4200 NB drive. I do believe you that it may run faster, probably a intel chipset, which are unparallel as of now (due to intel's extensive testing) but keep in mind to make an apples to apples comparison you need to have a clean install of the OS w/ no software added then run the test, on both systems.

I've had systems where my HD test slowed down to miserable rates (10MB/s) thinking it was a hardware issue. After being told to reinstall the OS, the scores drastically improved (to my disbelief). When you installed the HD did you do a clean install or use a disk copier (like ghost), if so that will be one reason for the slower rates.

[flecrone]

Thanks for confirming the CD transfer mode. I manually set the BIOS and removed and reinstalled the CD drive and secondary IDE. Now I'm showing "Multiword DMA Mode 2" for the drive. Oddly, DVDs seemed to play fine even with the mode set to PIO.

The hard disk was upgraded using Ghost. It would be nice to get more speed, but it's not worth trying to complete reinstall everything in the hopes of greater speed. I'll just stick with what I've got for now.

[CYberDog]

Hi folks!

I don't think I would be changing the subject in asking this - any comments on having an external firewire or USB 2.0 hard drive instead of replacing the original 4200rpm 40GB HD on the 220A5?

I'm considering on buying a Western Digital 120GB firewire external HD with 8MB buffer cache since the built-in 40GB is not enough for me. Would it make any difference in speed if I would use the external HD for games and other apps?

[Madgenius]

Yea the firewire will be faster than your stock HD. USB 2 will run about the same maybe slower than stock.

[flecrone]

I use both a 3.5 in. external FireWire drive and several 2.5 in. external USB 2.0 drives. I use the 2.5 in. drives when traveling, and the 3.5 in. drive at home for data backup and extra storage space.

I have noticed on the VPR and other computers that having a USB 2.0 device connected to the computer will slow down the system, even if the device is not active. Some people have said this should not happen, but I have seen it on more than one system. The slowdown makes sense in that USB relies on the computer's CPU to process all of the data in and out of the computer, while FireWire systems handle the processing themselves.

A poster in another thread mentioned that he is using a FireWire drive for video editing and is having very good results.

The only drawback I've seen with the FireWire drive is that XP cannot always properly recognize it when coming-out of standby or hibernation. This is a "known problem" with XP, but an official fix has not yet been released. Usually, just unplugging the drive and put it back in a sufficient. There is a fix available if you call Microsoft and ask them for it, but I haven't bothered to do so yet.

Another potential drawback with using FireWire with the VPR is that the 4-pin ports do not provide power, so an external power supply will be needed. This is no problem if you're using the drive at home, but an extra power cable (usually from a USB port) is needed if you're using a portable drive.

Below are the results of speed tests using the various drives on the VPR. The numbers in parentheses show how the internal drive performs when each external drive is connected to the computer. There is a significant decrease in speed when a USB 2.0 drive is connected, but not when the FireWire drive is connected.

(Read Burst Speed/Random Access Time)
Internal Alone
24.6 MB/s, 15.3 ms
USB 2.0
18 MB/s, 20.6 ms (Internal 17.3 MB/s, 18 ms)
Firewire
25.2 MB/s, 20 ms (Internal 24.5 MB/s, 15.2 ms)

[Madgenius]

try using the ALi 1671 chipset driver off the website www.ali.com.tw I use the intergrated 2.05, just deselect the drivers you don't need. It gave me a BIG boost in HD performance over the windows drivers.

If your thinking of a 1394 HD consider one w/ an Oxford 911 chipset their the best.

[solgae1784]

Can anyone confirm this? Do you select M1671 on the drop down menu?

[flecrone]

I tried installing the M1671 driver, but saw no increase in hard drive performance. I then contacted ATi and asked them about the latest driver for the VPR. They promptly e-mailed me a driver, but I also saw no increase in performance with that driver, either.

[Madgenius]

What version was the driver they emailed you flecrone?

I use a real benchmarking tool, I don't believe HD tach gives you realistic scores (not large enough test files). I used Sandra Pro (a widely used benchmarking program) then tested the raw drive (no OS cache on) then with the cache on. Since I mainly do video editing (moving and reading large continious files) I find Sandra's 510MB file testing, while it may take much longer to test, it gives me a much more true reading. This means more than it may appear, drives test differently when various file sizes are introduced and compared. The fastest drive transfering small files, may not be the best for large one's. In back to back tests, with and without the ALi drivers (uninstall>restart "system restore OFF"), there was no question, I get an improvement with the ALi drivers, (40%) dramatic yes. While others may not see as much of an improvement on there system, I notice this improvement on mine.

Also I find NO lack of HD performance in my vpr compared to other systems using Intel controllers (comparable HD's, using the same tests).

[flecrone]

The driver shows up as version 1.5.1.0, dated 03/06/2003.

Generally, I don't feel a lack of HD performance, but, for example, going into and coming out of hibernation seems much slower than it should be, and on the rare occassion when a large chunk of memory is being swapped, the computer feels slower than I think it should be (maybe I just expect too much).

I'm not overly concerned with slow performance, rather, I just want to make sure that I'm not missing something that might give me much better performance. But it seems like there is not much more I can do at this point, so I'll just be happy with what I've got, for now.

Thanks for the info.