P5B-BN (asus barebone) slow disk

[binary.koala]

hello there,

i have an unusual motherboard here - P5B-BN coming one of ASUS barebones. It's basically something very similar to "regular" P5B (VM?) e.g. has 965G and ICH8. For the rest I'm using 2 WD sata disks, PATA DVDRW and NV6600 in PCIe slot.

having installed JaS_10.4.8_AMD_Intel_SSE2_SSE3 via VMware i got it running pretty well, following P5B thread got fixed sound and LAN, but the only thing what's left and spoiling all my excitement is terribly slow HDD speeds. Xbench measures almost all hdd related values at around 2.5MB/s which is horrible. I was suspicious from the begin on as just the installation (which im doing now over again) would take over a night, very, very slow.

After the first install i tried changing ICH7MAHCI section of /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAHCIPort.kext/Contents/Info.plist with IOPCIPrimaryMatch value <string>0x28248086</string> but it didn't give any improvement. Changing SATA setting in BIOS from "compatible" to "enhanced" would put a gray cross on OSX boot splash...

 

Is there anyone with particular experience with this mobo, or some osx86 shrink that could help me out with an advice or a spell? i've been looking around here for any relevant info but could not succeed in finding one.

 

At the moment i'm reinstalling again with SATA "enhanced", installer would see the drive and there were _no_ "Still waiting for root device" messages. Anyhow it doesn't seem right taking hours to install.

Is it worth trying Mac OS X 10.4.8 JaS AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 (which is fresher) or there is some patch around that I keep on missing?

 

anyways, thanks for the efforts everyone,

quartz extreme still amazes me

[binary.koala]

add-on:

 

according to "Intel Chipset id tool" my P5B-BN has 82801HB/HR which is known to be ICH8/8R (not sure about "R" 'coz there is nothing about it in the bios), and my cpu is an oldie - prescott P4 524.

I still dont get any good disk performance and VMware installation of "JaS.10.4.8.Intel.SSE3 RE-RELEASE:REPACKAGE Mac OS X86" (02-03-07) fails at grey-apple splash screen, attached is the screen just before the crash - after it changes video mode VMware says *** Virtual machine kernel stack fault (hardware reset) *** and quits.

I my bios the only SATA related option is under "IDE Configuration" called "SATA Configuration" and has "disabled","compatible" and "enhanced" options. I tried both, compatible and enhanced - same result (ubuntu 6.10 sees SATA, windows boots in both), latest bios image.

 

what other info would be useful to post here? i'd really like to get my box to work, it's too close to step back

[binary.koala]

well, talking mostly to myself i manage to solve the problem!

my disk transfers much higher and the rest of the system running very well, including USB on the front

so, what i did was (i have two separated HDs for win and osx):

- get JaS.10.4.8.AMD.Intel.SSE2.SSE3.v1p.and.Deviant.patch

- set SATA as "enhanced" in BIOS

- install OSX following VMware installation method from Win

- reboot, change SATA to "normal" and pick other drive to boot from

- boot OSX for the first time and apply these two

- reboot, change SATA to "enhanced" again

 

then cross your finger and hopefully you will get near these transfer times:

 

Results 59.54

System Info

Xbench Version 1.3

System Version 10.4.9 (8P2137)

Physical RAM 1024 MB

Model ADP2,1

Drive Type WDC WD400JD-00HKA1

Disk Test 59.54

Sequential 86.50

Uncached Write 94.23 57.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 98.71 55.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 59.41 17.39 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 115.33 57.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 45.40

Uncached Write 16.46 1.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 114.17 36.55 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 91.36 0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 130.65 24.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]

 

nothing very impressive, but it is a great improvement from 2.5 MB/sec, so i'm happy. at least for now

Edited March 14, 2007 by binary.koala