PC Peripherals nTune recommendation doubt

J

jai

Disciple
I downloaded and ran nTune 2.05.09.08 to check up on my system performance. In the "Troubleshoot system performance" option, nTune recommends the following:

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Info and recommendation:
Current IDE channel mode
primary master channel: PIO Mode
primary slave channel: UDMA Mode 2
secondary master channel: PIO Mode
secondary slave channel: PIO Mode

Recomendation: Change IDE drive mode from PIO to
UDMA mode will increase disk read/write performance.
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I benched my HDD with Sandra 2005 and it reports a speed of 50 MB/s with an average access time of 7 ms. Is this OK for my Seagate SATA 7.2K rpm 80GB HDD?

I checked in the BIOS and the HDD is detected as "Third IDE master" and it says that UDMA Mode 6 is enabled for my SATA HDD. The only other thing in the detection list is the DVD/CD-RW drive on the "Primary IDE slave". Have I screwed up my cabling?

What is the meaning of the above recommendation? Note that I am facing absolutely no problems with the current setup, no slowdowns, no unexplained delays, nothing. Just that the recommendation is bugging me.

Should I or should I not change anything?
 
You have no drives on your Primary IDE Master, right?
nTune looks to be have assumed your HDD lies on the Master and is running in PIO mode, hence the recommendation. Since you have no drives in the three vacant positions, technically there are no drives running in PIO mode :)
Though not necessary you could switch your DVD/CD-RW drive to your Primary Master instead of Slave.
 
Can I run a single SATA drive on RAID? Doesn't it require at least two separate drives? The onboard RAID manager says RAID is not possible, since there is only one drive but there is another application called SAM (Sil Array Manager) which at least allows me to define something called a RAID group, whatever that is. Haven't tried it out though. Any advantages if I do?

And I guess I can ignore that recommendation from nTune, right?
 
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