Maxtor VL40 UDMA drive slow???

[Guest]

Hey guys, my Athlon 1200 system was shipped with a 20 Gb, 5400 rpm Maxtor DiamondMax VL40 Ultra DMA 100 harddrive (model # 32049H2). This is supposed to be a fairly fast drive (data from Maxtor: <9.5 ms seek time, up to 100 Mb/sec. data transfer, 2 Mb SDRAM Cache). However, using the SiSoft Sandra benchmark program, I got read/write speeds (sequential, buffered and random) of only around 1 to 3 Mb/sec. This was confirmed with two other Benchmark programs. I then turned DMA support on for this drive (Windows98). Speed did get better; Sandra results: buffered read=62 Mb/sec, sequential read=17 Mb/sec, random read=4 Mb/sec, buffered write=41 Mb/sec, sequential write=17 Mb/sec and random write=6 Mb/sec. Ok, maybe this is not bad (although the random speeds are still quite low), but I doubt if I should be satisfied with this. After all, my old Pentium 200 with a 2 Gb Seagate drive already got like 6 Mb/sec read/write (no UMDA!). The weird thing is that, when I hooked the Maxtor up to this old Pentium instead of the Seagate drive, I immediately got around 12 Mb/sec sequential read/write, using a non-UMDA 40-wire cable!. I don't see why this drive should be so much slower (only 1 to 3 Mb/sec speeds) on an Athlon 1200 system with DMA disabled. It's almost as if my Athlon system is slowing down the drive! The system has a MSI K7T Turbo MS-6330 (Via KT133A chipset) mainboard with an integrated IDE controller (VIA VT82C686B chipset, UMDA33/66/100). OF course I do use a 80-wire UMDA cable (no IDE1 slave and nothing on IDE2 during the test). All relevant settings in the BIOS are on Auto and manually changing these settings didn't help either. All drives tested were freshly defragmented and as little as possible Windows background programs were active. Anybody got a clue why the Maxtor drive is so slow in my system??? Thanks!

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Dude, it sounds like it's the system! I have a 1.0GHZ Thunderbird on a MSI K7T Turbo, and when I upgraded my system from a PIII 500mhz the same drive was on that system and I got better bench marks on HD Tach on that system then this one! I get the same average transfer but my burst is fairly low. I'm not sure what the deal is but it doesn't sound like it's a problem with the drive just something funky with the mobo. That's what I was thinking when I saw it anyways ... Once they have a new BIOS update I'm there!

Check out <A HREF="http://w\home.earthlink.net/~larscoleman" target="_new"> My Site </A> and under Case Mod's I have a bench of my drive on the PIII system. I'm too disappointed in the bench off of this new one that I'm not going to put it on there!

<font color=red>"Can you deal with that!"</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

Hey Lars, thanks for your comments. I tried this HD Tach you use. I get the following benchmarks for my Maxtor VL40 UDMA 5400 rpm drive: read speed 23304-30058 kps (average 27944 kps), CPU utilization 4.7%, random access time: 17.4 ms, read burst speed 71.8 Mb/sec. I'm not sure how to interprete these figures. I also couldn't find the benchmarks of your PIII system on your website. What do you think of these benchmarks for an Athlon 1200 system? Thanks!

 

[Lars_Coleman]

So if you goto my<A HREF="http://home.earthlink.net/~larscoleman" target="_new"> WebSite, </A> then Case Mod's, then scroll down the middle page it should show you two bench marks. One is from my new system and the other from my old.

Your basically getting a sustained transfer of 27MB/sec with a 17.4ms access time. Which isn't too bad considering it's a 5400RPM drive.

I'm diappointed in my Thunderbird system bench with my drive, but I'll live!

Hope that helps you with what you wanted to know ....

<font color=red>"Can you deal with that!"</font color=red>