Dario Greggio wrote:
> Russell McMahon wrote:
> 
>> What sort of data transfer rate would people expect?
> 
> I'd say the 150MBit/s should be somewhat guaranteed with that hardware, 
> so it would make some 15MByet/sec.
> The ATA133 was working good enough. Basic SATA are close to that.

SATA is 1.2Gbit/s or around 150MB/s (twice that for SATA-300, which most 
newer drives and motherboards handle). However, that rate is impossible 
to achieve (unless you're reading cached data), since the actual hard 
drive platters are *much* slower.

On my box (Athlon64 3000+), using Hitachi 80GB drives on a SATA-150 
motherboard, I get 30MB/s raw read speed. Factoring in filesystem 
overhead, it's probably closer to 25MB/s. If you copy the raw partition 
using DD, you'll get the full 30MB/s.

2-3MB/s is much too slow. Check your DMA status - Windows sometimes 
randomly decides to disable DMA on a hard drive, and the only way to 
reenable it is to screw around with the registry. I'd try a Linux 
Live-CD. Use hdparm -t /dev/sda (substitute in whatever your HDD device 
name is) to get a benchmark on read speed. If it's low, you probably 
have a hardware limitation. If it's high, then windows is screwing you over.

-- 
Hector Martin (hector@marcansoft.com)
Public Key: http://www.marcansoft.com/marcan.asc

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