Quote Originally Posted by C-N View Post
We haven't given up yet as Grinch shows his drives are doing fine.

I think apart from all the tweaks like stripe & cluster size partition size etc the choice of drives would make a fair difference too. I used to get about the same if not marginally better than you on my NF4 with 2 x 250gb maxline 3 samsung's but as Grinch has shown us 2 x 150gb Raptors put then to shame on the 680i.

I cant see how the 680 performance could be too far down on the older NF4 controller I think we just need to find the groove.

I have a 100mb/s 2 disk array for £40 & if I wanted to get close to Grinch's £300 Raptors I could bung another £20 drive in there & I reckon that would be real nice & quick for the money.



It may be that the older 150mb/s drives are dragging the controller down to there speed & therefor not allowing your 300mb/s drives to run any faster (this is just a guess)

I can switch from SATA 1/150mb/s & SATA 2/300mb/s using IBM/Hitachis ftool perhaps there is a tool that will allow you to enable SATA 2 on your older drives.

If you de select the "Let BIOS select transfer mode" this will un grey out the transfer mode box & may allow you to change from SATA 150 to 300.

The difference between 196 & 204mb/s on the burst is not worth worrying about imo you can get that much deviation due to the drives being fragged up a bit.

But 196 I have with SATA II generation drives and 204 with SATA I generation drivers !