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How to get more HDD speed and other things

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Pilot53

Registered
Joined
Oct 4, 2006
I just got a P5W DH Delux with an Intel 6800 extreem, and 4 meg of matching ram. My HDD is a SATA 3Gig sec type. 3 partitions, with D and E being NTFS, and C (boot drive) is FAT32. When I set the bios to AHCI on the drives page, I cannot boot. I have to set it at standard IDE. Further along in the bios, there is a setting to have the IDE act like AHCI, and I have that set. Where have I gone wrong, and why is it not running as fast as it should (UDMA-5) only.

Also, at the moment I have everything set to auto. My memory, which is DDR2-6400 (800MHZ) does not run that fast. When I set the memory speed to 800mhz, and change SPD to manual, I set the ras, tras ect. as the spec shows for the memory. On auto, everything works fine. When I bring up the speed to 800mhz, I get motherboard heat warnings on Sisoft Sandra, and my HDD will run continuosly when a task starts. When I shut down, and restarted, I got an overclock failed message. I changed everything back to AUTO, and it booted right up.

What am I doing wrong? (probably everything).

I am not trying to overclock, I just want a fast computer without heating it up.

Thanks,

Pilot53

My Machine

Asus P5W DH Delux
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 extreme
4 meg matching DDR2 OCZ Gold High Performance (2 sets 1G matching)
Nvidia 7950 GX2 video card
250GIG SATA-2 HDD
550W PSU
lousy case, not very great cooling. Lots of fans that seem to do nothing.
Windows XP SP2
 
lousy case, not very great cooling. Lots of fans that seem to do nothing

mabey do something about this first?
there are no lousey cases, its just a matter of using logic to creat a FLOW that uses some basic principals.
dont create a Vaccume, that sucks
dont build up pressure, that blows
Heat Rises, that is why hell really isnt down

generally speaking cool air usually could come in the front of the case, and be drawn out the back.
if you have 2 fans on the back, and they are pulling air, first WHERE is the air comming from?
does the air travel through your case, "exchanging" all the air in there? or are the fans just creating a vaccume inside there.
if they are blowing, where are the blowing to?
some fan or Hole at least, needs to have air comming IN, then the back fans and the PSU fans can pull it on out.
that air should go through the whole computer, across the HEat producers, like the ram the cpu the chipset , and the hard drives, and the voltage regulators.
if you have Hard drive behind plastic covers, WHERE are they supposed to get thier air from?
lots of cases , and we will assume yours, have the back drawing out fans, that is ok, so how about making some holes on the front, so air can come in.

to cool the hard drives, pull out them plastic covers, and get out your ruler, and a straight edge, and/or Print a Picture with some perfectly evenly spaced holes.
use some rubber cement craft type glue or water based glue, something removable, and stick your template you printed on top, then go to the garage, load up a 1/4" drill bit, and carefully perferate that plastic pannel.
repeat as nessisary.
it helps if you got one or 2 extras , for the few crooked one you make :)
use a 1/2" drill bit with your hands, or a round file reamer, or something to Bevel the front and back of the holes.
ahh now aint that pretty :)

now you got front holes, that will draw across the hard drive, and flow across your whole case.

Stuff Like That.

if you have fans behind case GRILLS, the case grill can take 50% of the CFM of your fan away, remove or completly protect all electronics, and fire up the DREMMEL and hack up the case grill holes , and case fan holes till there is a big gaping hole there, and metal edges sticking out to cut your hands on.
this keeps small children and cats from getting curious :)
metal wire grills can be drilled for and stuck on there afterwards to cover it more nicely.

DONT GET metal shavings in anything, that would be bad, very bad.

analise the air holes, is there 50% metal and 50% hole? or 10% metal and 90% hole?

Get BETTER fans, good 2 ball bearing fans, are quiet and can push a lot of air, take less power, and doing so output less heat themselves.
92mm and 120mm fans can move LOTS more air at the same RPMs, lots of cases dont have the HOLE made for them, but then you got a SAWS-ALL right :)

remember heat rises right? best place for a fan, is right there on the top.
a PSU with a bottom facing 120mm fan can get a LOT of heat out right at the CPU area, where the cpu is blowing hot air all over everything. if your PSU sucks, get one that really sucks instead. kill 2 boyds with one stone, fix your power up and cooling too.

Or if you can pop the top off like on some cases, you can stuff a fan in the top, put one of those round wire grills on, and suck the heat right off the top.
then again, dont create a vaccume, the air has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere, should be flowing air across your parts. spin a fan around the other way if nessiary to make flow.

there is also DUCTING, cold air into the case, right to the hot parts, fan or no fan, or ducting direct to the CPU fan for cold air into the cpu.
or reverse that, and BLOW the hot air off the cpu direct to the outside, bypassing dumping it into the case, having to be removed 2 times. Note: reversing cpu flow takes a really good setup, but will cool everything when the cpu heat is blown out direct.

Carve holes in the side, and stuff a fan a duct or just a grilled hole in there.

its all arts and crafts, minor machining, and analising FLOW.
upgrade a few fans here and there, Vantec has some great ball bearing fans. the stealths are slow and silent.
 
Last edited:
Pilot53 said:
...When I bring up the speed to 800mhz, I get motherboard heat warnings
What BIOS settings are you changing to get the memory to 800mhz?
 
Psycogeek, thanks for the reply.

There are 4 fans at the front that draw air from a hole on the bottom front, under the case, which gets closed up when the unit sits on the carpet. I elevate the front to let air in. Those fans blow air over the hard drives. There is a fan on the side that draws air in also, and a larger fan in the rear that takes the air out, as does the PSU's fan. I am going to get a better case as soon as I have time.

Billb,
You have to change the CPU control to manual, then go into the memory page, change the setting to 800 mhz. Everything else is on auto.

I still would like to know why my drive will not work with the AHCI setting.

Pilot
 
Pilot53 said:
I still would like to know why my drive will not work with the AHCI setting.

Pilot

You have to install the AHCI drivers. Not sure how to install them on a current install of XP, as XP will inform you that you don't have the required hardware with AHCI disabled, but won't boot with it enabled. I'm sure there has to be a way, but I just ended up reinstalling the OS because I was going to anyhow. If you go that route, you need to use the "F6" option at the beginning of the setup process to specify a storage subsystem driver. You can get the floppy image for that driver from here: http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-022768.htm
.(click on the intel matrix storage manager and scroll down to the floppy part) Make sure you have it set to AHCI prior to starting the install process.

As far as the memory goes, there isn't anything wrong with using SPD settings. If you really want to specify timings manually, grab the memset utility to enumerate your current timings while you're in windows. That way you can set it to auto, print out a detailed list of all the SPD timings, (both regular and sub-timings) manually set your system to those, and then start to tweak from there.
 
I still dont understand the AHCI issue. I would think that with a new system, the software would include the drivers for it. I do not want to reload windows xp, and the current drive is FAT 32. I thought that it should still run at high SATA speeds (3gig/s).

I do not have a utility to determine the speed. Maybe Sisoft Sandra will do it.

Pilot
 
i use a fat32 system drive, and 2 others too GUILTY :-(
its accessable easily outside of the OS, when you dont have an NTFS os running, its a simple task to mess with a fat32 drive.
my system drive is also very small, not advantaging in any way from the NTFS, i dont NEED front end security (walk-up) not that the other thing really provides it via the correct tools.

there are no servers or connections allowed into this computer, other than the net, and it is fairly well controlled.

ghost cloning in dos prefers to use a fat32 drive for its image file.
so i gotta have space for that somewhere.

NTFS isnt performance, its security and large size.
 
Pilot53 said:
I still dont understand the AHCI issue. I would think that with a new system, the software would include the drivers for it.

It's a storage subsystem driver. You didn't install it with the OS, so it's not installed. XP came out in 2001, this device came out this year.
 
TruckChase! said:
NTFS has been faster since Win2k.

Hmmm, it IS. i didnt know that. a Bench shows NTFS about 1-2% faster than Fat32, with similar CPU usage during the process.
my test used similar cluster sizes, and only has ONE NTFS feature turned off.
one Less reason to use fat
 
So I would guess that if I did not load Windows with the drivers for AHCI, then I cannot run windows at all with it enabled unless I reload windows with the drivers installed on the floppy, and installing the drivers after pressing F6. I get the sequence, I did not know that even with the drivers, windows will not normally load with it enabled.

Pilot
 
Pilot53 said:
So I would guess that if I did not load Windows with the drivers for AHCI, then I cannot run windows at all with it enabled unless I reload windows with the drivers installed on the floppy, and installing the drivers after pressing F6. I get the sequence, I did not know that even with the drivers, windows will not normally load with it enabled.

Pilot

Sorry Pilot, I've been looking for a way to install the driver without having the device enabled as such, but I just can't seem to locate a way. :eh?: I don't think many people know about the performance boost with the SATA controller set to AHCI, so it' hasn't been paid all that much attention to I guess.
 
Well, seeing that I do not have a raid set up, Im not going to worry about it. I will wait till Vista comes out retail, and upgrade then, and include the drivers.

Thanks for all your replys.

Pilot...
 
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