Building a Graphics Workstation: Hard Drives Tests: Seagate ST3320613AS
June 17, 2008
At the time of putting together my system, solid state discs were either too slow or very expensive. WD latest model 'VelociRaptor' was not available either. I chose 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA ST3320613AS 320 GB hardrives for operating system and scratch disc.
For those interested here are the transfer rates of this hard drive connected to Gigabyte SATA controller in IDE mode (Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R motherboard):
And the same hard drive after installing SATA driver for Gigabyte controller and changing controller mode to AHCI in BIOS:
Very interesting drop in transfer rate. Obviously on Gigabyte SATA controller ACHI mode for this hard drive might not lead to improve performance.
The same drive connected to Intel ICH9R SATA controller in RAID mode (Intel recommends RAID mode rather then AHCI):
Obviously Intel ICH9R SATA controller in RAID mode works with this Seagate drive as well as Gigabyte SATA controller in IDE mode.
Installation of Windows XP 32 bit on drive connected in SATA (non IDE) mode requires 'F6' method of installing driver prior to Windows installation. The easy work around this on this motherboard is to connect the drive first to Gigabyte controller in IDE mode, and install Windows. This does not require installation of SATA driver. Then from Windows, install Intel® Matrix Storage Manager driver, swap the hard drive with installed Windows XP to Intel ICH9R SATA controller and restart.
Windows Vista apparently should have all the required drives by default, not needing 'F6' during installation.
The plan is to replace this OS drive for either VelociRaptor or SSD and use both of these drives as a scratch disc in RAID 0.