[Sfor]

HP D530 with Intel 865 chipset and 82801EB controller. Two SATA Seagate 1.5TB and 2TB drives. HDD controller is set in BIOS to compatibility mode with multisector and UDMA enabled for both HDD drives. Dual boot Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 professional.

File copy operation between drives (5.86GB):
- Windows 2000 - 2m 13s
- Windows 98 - 3m 15s

The Windows 98 does have DMA transfers enabled for both HDD drives. I'm suspecting the W98 does not take advantage of the higher than UDMA 33 modes.

I'm looking for the way to check what particular UDMA mode Windows 98 is using.

Also, It would be good to force Windows 98 to perform as well as the Windows 2000 does.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 23 April 2012 - 01:18 AM

[TmEE]

My 250GB Seagate 7200.10 reaches speeds near 100MB/sec on reads without much problems. Perhaps there is some driver issues going on between different chipsets ? I used to have a Via based mobo, now I use a i875P+ICH5 board

[Sfor]

Does your 250GB drive have a SATA interface? I do suspect the performance issue is somehow related to the SATA.

As for my drivers versions:

Intel® 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers
CONFIGMG.vxd 4.10.2225

Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)
ESDI_506.pdr 4.10.2230
IOS.vxd 4.10.2225

[jaclaz]

Unless I am mistaken, you are using the disk under Win98 in "IDE emulation mode".
Are you doing the same on Win2k (or are you using "AHCI" drivers)?
If yes, the difference is likely to be NCQ :dubbio:.
http://www.msfn.org/...mance-question/

jaclaz

[Sfor]

I'm sorry, but you asked two different questions. So, I'm not entirely shure to what question the presumed answer applies to.

In any case, both operating systems are working with exactly the same "Combined" BIOS setting. To be more precise the HP Compaq BIOS does not have "IDE emulation mode". However, the "Combined" setting does seem to be "IDE emulation mode", as opposed to "Separate" (probably AHCI).

[TmEE]

I got an IDE drive. I gave up on onboard SATA as I could not get it work with IDE drives (though rloew has a patch for it, but I'm on the cheap side for now) and installed a Sil3114 based SATA controller for my SATA needs and speeds are very nice on those too but I haven't done any tests how fast.

[Sfor]

I decided to leave Silicon Image controllers behind, when I started to play with cheap second hands HP computers with integrated Intel SATA controllers.

Also, I had an opportunity to test two dual boot HP DC7100 with Intel 82801FB chip. I found no significant difference with HDD performane (W98 vs. W2000) in case of those two. But, both of them had just 40GB old SATA drives. So, the difference in tranfer speed could be bottlenecked by the drives poor performance. In any case, I'm planning to make some more detailed testing by moving the two huge Seagate dives to a HP DC7100. I should get a definitive answer, then. For the moment, the issue seems to be related just to the 82801EB chip or just to the HP D530.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 23 April 2012 - 12:06 PM

[jds]

Sfor, on 23 April 2012 - 04:56 AM, said:

I'm sorry, but you asked two different questions. So, I'm not entirely shure to what question the presumed answer applies to.

In any case, both operating systems are working with exactly the same "Combined" BIOS setting. To be more precise the HP Compaq BIOS does not have "IDE emulation mode". However, the "Combined" setting does seem to be "IDE emulation mode", as opposed to "Separate" (probably AHCI).

To me, "Combined" implies "Hey, I'll support IDE emulation or native SATA, whichever you prefer". So it may be operating in two different modes for the two O/S.

Joe.

[Sfor]

I do not think so. The HP DC7100 Intel 915 + 82801FB uses exactly the same BIOS naming convention. With both computer models in both Windows 98 and 2000 the "combined" mode presents OS with just one dual ATA controller with one PATA and one SATA. Both subcontrollers do show master and slave drives. It disables the third from the integrated controllers, as well.

On the other hand, the "Separate" settings prevents Windows 98 from booting, while Windows 2000 detects additional controller.

My observations are showing the same Windows 98 instalation ported to DC7100 works significantly faster with some disk related operations. In D530 i865 P4 3GHz ICH5 moving about 1GB of data by a DOS based application works several times slower, than on DC7100 i915 P4 2.8GHz ICH6 with a much slower HDD.

It could be related to a fact the ICH5 82801EB is the first from the SATA capable 82801 series, so it could have some bugs in the BIOS "IDE compatibility mode" or driver for Windows 98.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 24 April 2012 - 02:34 AM

[Atmosphere XG]

Sfor, on 23 April 2012 - 01:18 AM, said:

HP D530 with Intel 865 chipset and 82801EB controller. Two SATA Seagate 1.5TB and 2TB drives. HDD controller is set in BIOS to compatibility mode with multisector and UDMA enabled for both HDD drives. Dual boot Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 professional.

File copy operation between drives (5.86GB):
- Windows 2000 - 2m 13s
- Windows 98 - 3m 15s

The Windows 98 does have DMA transfers enabled for both HDD drives. I'm suspecting the W98 does not take advantage of the higher than UDMA 33 modes.

I'm looking for the way to check what particular UDMA mode Windows 98 is using.

Also, It would be good to force Windows 98 to perform as well as the Windows 2000 does.

Hi.

If your question is based on speed, Windows 2000 is faster than Windows 98 FE, which is faster than Windows 98 SE.

That is based on my analysis after years of using Windows 98 FE then moving to Windows 98 SE for a short time period then upgrading to Windows 2000. My experience with Windows 98 SE is it (Windows 98 SE) offered a lag time in terms of response compared to Windows 98 FE & Windows 2000.

Of course, some may beg to differ. It really depends on what you are using your operating system as.

[Sfor]

The general speed difference between the two systems is not the topic here. I did research the problem, and the HDD performance on other computers is not particulary different between the systems in question. In some cases Windows 98 HDD performance appeared to be faster. Also I do not work with Windows 98 FE, at all. So, I'll be referring just to Windows 98 SE.

As for the network speed difference, Windows 98 adds a significant lag to TCP/IP stack. The max connection speed suffers from that lag. So, in general Windows 2000 can get higher TCP/IP transfers, than Windows 98 does. On the other hand in certain circumstances Windows 98 seems to work significantly faster with NetBeui than Windows 2000 does.

According to my experiences Windows 98 is faster with high quality video decoding. Too bad it can not handle newer codecs, thou.

This post has been edited by Sfor: 24 April 2012 - 10:21 PM

[Sfor]

I was able to perform the final testing. I did move the two hard drives with both operating systems from HP D530 82801EB to HP DC7100 with 82801FB controller. Now the HDD performance in both operating systems is almost the same. 6.7GB was copied in 2m 51s in Windows 98, while it took 2m 40s in Windows 2000. So, Windows 2000 seems to be a bit faster, but the difference is many times smaller.

The question remains. Why the HP D530 is so slow. Is it the 82801EB fault, or perhaps there is some other problem with this computer model?

This post has been edited by Sfor: 02 May 2012 - 03:02 AM