Vista - 500GB Seagate Cuda Question.

So I have a question to ask you pro's.. maybe someone like SCSI RAID will see this thread.. lol.

basically when I built my system i got alot of the best things I could afford.. One of them being this HD.. it's one of the best for it's kind. 500 GB Seagate Barracuda with the added 32mb cache, and 7200.11 the new .11 model is there best one. there is a 10 and a .09

so this HD is able to work with SATA 1.5Gb/s and SATA 3Gb/s interface speeds. it came stock with the little Pin set at 1.5 so I know going to 3Gb/s is double.. but I left it in the 1.5 slot.. so my question is How big of a difference will that make. would I notice anything by switching.. or should I leave it alone. and also would it be just as easy as Powering Down my system and moving the Pin..?? let me kno as I'm just curious.. these days I'm wanting everything to be fast as it can.. lol

thanks!

Hey xguntherc,

I can't really answer your question on a technical level, but maybe on a practical one. I have got two raid 0 disks each made up of 2 500 GB HD's each, two Seagate 9200.11's and two WD Caviar SE16's. Both pair are SATA 300 or SATA II or whatever you young people are calling it these days. That is, both supposedly capable of moving data at 300 MBps. (Which isn't equal to 3 Gbps, but close. Have they just given up on accuracy of expression?) But, transferring files from one Raid to another (which I guess is about the fastest thing I can do off of the cpu bus), the best throughput I have ever achieved has been capped by 90 MBps. A pretty far cry away from the mark, no?

That's as close as I can come to answering your question, some food for thought. You know, the USB 2.0 standard calls for a top throughput of 60 MBps, and until recently I never found a single device that actually reached that speed. I got a nice 4 gig zip stiick that will almost do that, downhill only, still only about 20 uphill. My guess is that these HD's might reach the SATA 300 speeds on the next-gen planars, the 1333MHz busses. But it's an ill-informed guess.

i c... so basically might as well leave it be.. as it wont do me a darn thing to pull it out and move the pin over.. lol

thats sad. Meh, oh well.

Thanks for the info

Whoa Nelly,

I don't say it won't do you any good, I say it didn't do me any good.

Anyway, on the 'Cudas you don't have to move the jumper over, just pull it off. On one of mine that was pretty difficult, because the jumper had worker it's way pretty far down the pins and there ain't much clearance there. But in the second it was a breeze.

Might learn something more from it. If you decide to try it, benchmark before and after and post the result. Even if you have to use the built-in performance index, it will tell you something.

Anway xguntherc, good luck to you. And sorry for calling you Nelly.

Gunter - run it at full 3.0 GB/s speeds - trust me.

I ahve 2 of those bad boys and am getting 2 more. Those 520AS drivers are perfect. And the speeds are incomparable.

Hey gunther,
It's just as easy as turning off your computer and taking out the pin. No further configurations required.