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Old Mobo running XP - SSD / SATA III compatibility


risk_reversal

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Hi guys,

Wonder if any of you can help.

I am running an old rig, Asus A8V Deluxe Rev 2.0. I am trying to upgrade a HDD and wanted to know about SATA compatibilty.

My current set up is that I am running 2 SATA II HDDs from the onboard Promise Controller (Sata 378 TX2 plus). The bios is set up to run in IDE mode so the drives run independently (ie non raid).

Although my HDDs are SATA II, I have set the jumper on them to work in SATA I mode.

My question is not strictly to do with XP but more so in respect of the onboard HW that I am running. Since a lot of you are runnig XP, I am sure that some of you must have older HW as well and perhaps someone has had to solve this problem.

Question: Is my onboard Promise Controller able to operate SATA III HDDs and not lead to data corruption of any kind.

The Asus forum has an example of someone who has upgraded his drives to SSD / SATA III on the Promise Controller and he reports success. However, the user does not provide any further info and certainly no details of any data corruption that he may have experienced subsequently. So I would ideally like to have real live info as regards this.

I don't think that the board manufacturer is important as the onboard Promise Controller SATA 378 was used on many boards of that era.

Many thanks for any info provided.

Cheers

Edited by risk_reversal
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I have run across one post from a user who upgraded his system in this way and stated that the onboard Promise Controller 378 does indeed detect SATA III / SSD and that XP also sees thos HDDs.

No further info was provided in terms of the stability of that connection, as far as data corruption is concerned. This is what I would like infomation on.

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9 hours ago, risk_reversal said:

I have run across one post from a user who upgraded his system in this way and stated that the onboard Promise Controller 378 does indeed detect SATA III / SSD and that XP also sees thos HDDs.

No further info was provided in terms of the stability of that connection, as far as data corruption is concerned. This is what I would like infomation on.

Friend i never use promise .

I use my on board jmicron and intel ahci.

Anyway , I hope any one here will help you

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@risk_reversal

I would be curious to understand how this doubt came to you, I mean, did you experience corruption when using SATA II?

Or did you read some reports of data corruption happening on that controller in SATA II or SATA III mode?

BUT if you are using IDE mode in the BIOS, you are not using SATA at all (i.e. the jumper of the hard disk won't make a change) :unsure: the disk will be accessed in IDE mode (i.e. THEORETICALLY 133 mb/s as opposed ot the SATA I 150 mb/s or SATA II 300 mb/s) anyway.

As a side note and general advice, with SATA it has come back to life the advice Jerry Pournelle gave in the good ol' times of SCSI, in case of issues it is ALWAYS the cable (JFYI):

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosreports/Recommended.html#Storage
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/163189-hard-drive-controller-errors-abound-atapi-event-11/

jaclaz
 

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Many thanks for your reply jaclaz

On 30 May 2016 at 11:16 AM, jaclaz said:

I would be curious to understand how this doubt came to you, I mean, did you experience corruption when using SATA II?

Or did you read some reports of data corruption happening on that controller in SATA II or SATA III mode?

BUT if you are using IDE mode in the BIOS, you are not using SATA at all (i.e. the jumper of the hard disk won't make a change) :unsure: the disk will be accessed in IDE mode (i.e. THEORETICALLY 133 mb/s as opposed ot the SATA I 150 mb/s or SATA II 300 mb/s) anyway.

Although I am currently running two SATA II HDDs on the onboard Promise Controller, I have used the limiting jumpers on the HDDs (at the back) to restrict them to SATA I speed. Both drives are Seagates, one is the ST3500514NS it's an Enterprise drive. I have never tried the drives without the limiting jumper. The reason being that my Asus motherboard also has the Via on board SATA controller (chipset VT8237) which is not compatible with SATA II HDDs. At the time there were many posts about data corruption on the Via SATA controller with SATA II HDDs and the only way to make them work was by limiting them to SATA I.

With this corruption in mind, I made the perhaps false but logical move to limit my HDDs to SATA I even though there was no evidence to the contrary when putting them on the onboard Promise Controller. I though the minor speed boost was not worth the safety aspect.

I did however take into account the following:

1. That there was a possibility that the onboard Promise Controller may not be compatible

and

2. As you are probably aware the onboard Promise Controller 20378 shares the PCI bus with other PCI devices and runs at 133MB/s (at 32 bit which my board has). If a drive is going to be using 150MB/s+ then a bottleneck would inevitably occur on the PCI bus. This could cause issues and potentially data corruption.

Setting the Promise Controller to IDE mode in the bios, I beleive, merely allows for HDDs to be used in an individual and separate manner. Year ago I had an MSI KT3 Ultra 2 board which had an older Promise Controller on board with no IDE mode and it was still possible to arrange this set up (ie running 2 independant and separate HDDs in a 1+0 single strip single disc RAID-0) even though the Promise Controller had Raid option only.

What I am trying to say is that setting the Promise Controller to Raid or IDE in the bios would merely change only how the drives are to be interpreted by the Promise Controller.

There is a post made by a user years ago in the Asus forum who attached SSD and SATA III drives to the same motherboard that I have and put them on the Promise Controller. Both drives were detected by the Promise Controller bios and Windows. He reported that Windows XP now booted in 1/3 of the time. If that is so and all the data was flowing into the PCI bus, then it is logical to assume that the onboard Pomise Controller is not limiting any speed and that all the bandwidth on the PCI bus itself must be being used. Whenever bottlenecks occur, data corruption is never far behing. Do you see what I mean

On 30 May 2016 at 11:16 AM, jaclaz said:

BUT if you are using IDE mode in the BIOS, you are not using SATA at all (i.e. the jumper of the hard disk won't make a change) :unsure: the disk will be accessed in IDE mode (i.e. THEORETICALLY 133 mb/s as opposed ot the SATA I 150 mb/s or SATA II 300 mb/s) anyway.

I am not too sure what you are saying. Are saying that selecting IDE mode in the bios for the onboard Promise Controller will only allow drives to run at a theoretical max of 133MB/s?

BTW, it I run HD Tune on both of my drives, I get about 75MB/s for each. Which makes me confortable given that the PCI bus can handle up to 133MB/s.

Not sure if I am confused but if you have any further thoughts let me know.

Cheers

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1 hour ago, risk_reversal said:

I am not too sure what you are saying. Are saying that selecting IDE mode in the bios for the onboard Promise Controller will only allow drives to run at a theoretical max of 133MB/s?

In a nutshell, yes. The setting in BIOS changes the device (controller) VID and PID, or if you prefer the controller has two PID's, one connected to IDE mode and one connected to SATA mode. To the OS driver the controller is either a IDE controller (actually Parallel ATA) or a SATA (AHCI) one. Since ATA (Parallel ATA) tops at 133 Mb/s in the latest standards, i.e. ATA/ATAPI 7, you can attach to that bus *whatever* "fast" device you like to, but it won't ever exceed the 133 Mb/s.

Your board (and OS driver) believe to be using an IDE controller and an ATA drive.

You have to understand how a good half (or maybe three quarters) of the names we commonly use in the computing field are the result of a total failure to communicate (by the good engineeers) and total failure to be accurate (by the marketing folks), and as well quite a bit of the "perceived information" is either false or wrong.

You will need to go through these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

and possibly also these:
https://www.phildev.net/ata-modes.html

https://expertester.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/ahci-vs-ide-–-benchmark-advantage/
 

As you have just noticed experimentally a good "real world" hard disk speed pre-SATA III is between (say) 50 and 140 Mb/s and (rarely) a "top range" SATA III exceeds 200 Mb/s, see as an example:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2013/-02-Read-Throughput-Maximum-h2benchw-3.16,Marque_fbrandx42,2900.html

Your 75 Mb/s sounds "just right" considering that the hard disks are older than the above.

So - basically - there are NOT any difference between IDE/ATA 133 Mb/s and SATA I (150 Mb/s) there might be - maybe - some marginal differences with SATA II devices in AHCI mode if NCQ (Native Command Queing) is working, the "real thing" with SATA II and SATA III controllers can be appreciated with SSD's, which are waaay faster than any rotating hard disk.

jaclaz

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Many thanks for your reply and info jaclaz.

Let me ask you a final question.

If I get say a SATA III replacement drive and the throughput of the new drive is say 120MB/s. Since the bandwidth of the PCI bus is only a max of 133MB/s what is going to happen to the data flow along the PCI bus if I am using other devices located on the PCI bus at the same time or if I am copying data from one HDD to the other.

For clarity although I have 2 HDDs in my rig, I use the 2nd HDD to copy and save the data from the 1st disc as well as making images of the system partition.

Many thanks for your help

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  • 3 weeks later...

At the Pata era, Via was unable to produce a working host chip. All their chips corrupted the data. It was not a matter of tuning, driver, whatever - just flawed chip design.

The best explanation is that their Sata chips too are just as flawed, and Sata1 likely isn't much better than Sata2 setiing.

So just keep away from any disk host by Via: these people don't know how to design them. But have Via Usb 2.0 chips, these work.

Put your disks on the Promise chip only. And use Sata mode on it, at full throttle, because with Pata you lose the simultaneous and out-of-order multiple requests, which do make a difference. More so with mechanical disks, but with Ssd too.

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8 hours ago, pointertovoid said:

At the Pata era, Via was unable to produce a working host chip. All their chips corrupted the data. It was not a matter of tuning, driver, whatever - just flawed chip design.


 

Well, I have a few Via Epia's (ITX small motherboards) running NT 4.00 or 2000 since 2003 or so with IDE/PATA disk drives (and still running fine), and never had once a single instance of data corruption (a hard disk or two failed, of course, a well as more than a few Power Supplies, but nothing ever connected with the IDE bus), I guess that what you report depends on specific chips or chipsets or possibly even with drivers, but to generalize it so widely as you did :w00t: seems to me excessive ... :whistle:

jaclaz
 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I take good notice.

I had a single mobo with Via Pata host which did corrupt the data. At that time and also with later Via hosts, including at the beginning of Sata, many more users noticed data corruption. Since this is THE unacceptable failure, I decided never to have a Via host again.

But I did have Via Usb 2.0 / Pci chips that worked nicely. As good as Nec.

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