OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware

PCIe - SATA3 card choices?

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ivan:
Hi Dave,

Maybe I should consider using the SDD drive I got a couple of years ago for a notebook but ended up never using.  Might be interesting to see just how fast the boot info scrolls up the screen - at the moment it is too fast to read.

Dariusz Piatkowski:
All in all you guys here are all the disks I'm currently dealing with:

1) SSD - Samsung Evo 850
2) HDD - WD VelociRaptor 10K RPM (WDC WD3000HLFS-01G6U0)
3) HDD - WD Caviar Blue 7200 RPM (WDC WD5000AAKS-00V1A0)


--- Code: ---Disk I/O disk 1-2: 238473 MB - Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      140.779    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      214.527    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      224.304    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      209.764    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      216.198    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :       18.430    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks

 Disk I/O disk 2-3: 286166 MB - WD3000HLFS-01G6U0
   Avg. data access time :        6.900    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      219.546    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      121.100    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      106.410    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :       74.197    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      100.569    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :       16.530    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :      564.284    Disk I/O-marks

 Disk I/O disk 2-4: 476938 MB - WD5000AAKS-00V1A0
   Avg. data access time :       14.700    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      188.920    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      128.601    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      109.896    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :       60.913    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :       99.803    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :       16.850    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :      552.953    Disk I/O-marks

--- End code ---

I will tell you this, where the VelociRaptor made a real dent, the SSD really took things to the next level.

The key here is the access time, this is what provides for a more responsive system feeling, and when coupled with a high and sustained xfer rate will give you a machine that just flat-out seems to load things quick and you never have to "wait for the drive".

Dariusz Piatkowski:
Hey Ivan,


--- Quote from: ivan on March 29, 2020, 09:48:58 pm ---...Can I convert you to the idea of building a nice new AMD Ryzen based computer?  It might get round all your problems...
--- End quote ---

No need to, I've been a convert all my PC life actually - seriously, starting way back when the Intel 8086 4.77 MHz was yanked and replaced with the 10 MHz AMD CPU. But I wish I could take the Ryzen plunge for our platform, and while I've read about your success in the past, for now I'm still going to wait a tad more for AOS to complete their enhancements.

Having said that, my son's machine (heavy into graphics processing) is a Ryzen7 2700X box, Samsung 970 Pro 512Gig M.2 NVMe drive, 32G RAM, the machine is a BEAST!!!

Dave Yeo:
Hi Ivan, boot isn't that much faster with most of the time checking the various partitions, including one slow drive. Things like SeaMonkey starting up are noticeably faster. Worth trying.

Dariusz Piatkowski:
Quick update for you guys.

So off I went at least tryig to get the AHCI part working for me. All three storage devices (1 SSD and 2 HDDs) support NCQ, so why not at least try to take advantage of it, right?

The only point to note here is very specific to my hardware: booting up with AHCI driver enabled caused my otherwise "orderly" arrangement of devices to get jumbled a bit...basically the DVD player got tossed onto a AHCI port while one of the HDDs remained on the SATA/IDE controller.

The above situation cause the following ahci.log entry to be created:


--- Code: ---Adapter 0: PCI=0:17:0 ID=1002:4390 AMD SB700/800 irq=22 addr=0xfe8ffc00 version=10100
  Port 0:
    Drive 0: 30401 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors per track (238472MB) (LVM)
             Model: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB             
  Port 1:
    Drive 0: 36481 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors per track (286165MB) (LVM)
             Model: WDC WD3000HLFS-01G6U0                 
  Port 2:
    No drive present
  Port 3:
    Drive 0: atapi removable
             Model: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22NS50               
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
...

--- End code ---

with multiple "port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port" messages being posted.

I figured this must have been due to the ATAPI device being on that AHCI port, and despite the fact that the AHCI readme implies that's OK to do (although some audio CD functionality may be lost) I did not understand the meaning of this message. For all I know this is maybe caused by lack of CD/DVD media being present in the drive itself, I did not test that.

Anyways, I re-wired which ports my storage devices were connected to on the motherboard. This allowed me to toss all the NCQ supporting drives on the AHCI controller and relegate the ATAPI device to the good ol' SATA/IDE controller being driven by DANI drivers.

Things appear to be working. Quick re-test showed a tiny increase in throughput with the biggest difference being the CPU utilization drop from about 20-25% to about 3-5% on the AHCI setup. This makes sense if I correctly understood one of the advantages of AHCI setup, which is the offloading of the scheduling and transmission of the command protocol from the CPU onto the device controller.

As a side note, I am curious why my SSD cache/bus transfer is so poor? Not related to the AHCI change, must be something different because it certainly is strange that it's actually slower than the HDDs.

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