Why is my HD so SLOW???

[Brad]

I have a machine with an Aopen Via motherboard. AX64Pro. It supports ATA66.

The harddrive in it is an 20gig ATA100 7200rpm Quantum drive.

I just installed the SiSoft Sandra progam and ran the drive benchmark. This shows you your drive speed (after running for around 10 minutes) and for reference, shows you the speed of similar drives.

The reference drives follow along with thier scores...
ATA U100 2x Raid 0 7200rpm - 36300
ATA U100 7200rpm - 24000
ATA U66 RAID 0 7200rpm - 32000
ATA U66 7200rpm - 17000

My drive scored - 6479

There is obviously somthing wrong here. I understand that the ATA100 drive will run at ATA66 in this motherboard, but that does not explain the horrible performance. What can I do? What should I check to make sure that the drive is installed properly.

Yes, I have good cable (rated at ATA100). The drive is the master drive on the primary IDE port.

What is going on?

Other Machine info..
Celeron 666
512mb ram
Windows 2000 Advanced Server
TNT2 video
etc
etc

Thanks.

<font color=purple><b>Brad</b></font color=purple><P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by brad on 10/24/01 10:11 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Lars_Coleman]

I can't say I am a big believer in SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks, but that is pretty bad to say the least. I would actually look into HDTach. It's a better bench mark program in my opinion but you will have to "pay" for it to use it on Windows 2000.

If all else fails goto Maxtor's <A HREF="http://www.maxtor.com/Softwaredownload/default.htm" target="_new"><font color=blue>Website</font color=blue></A> and get Powermax 3.0 and test the drive.

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>

 

[Lucol]

Have you installed Via's IDE drivers? You can get them at www.viaarena.com. I noticed a big improvement when I switched to their drivers instead of using Microsoft's.

 

[Brad]

Yes, I have installed the VIA drivers. After I ran the benchmark the first time, I reinstalled the via drivers and tried aging. It made no difference.
There must be an answer to this..

<font color=purple><b>Brad</b></font color=purple>

 

[Guest]

Prolly a disk cache problem, go here to <A HREF="http://www.pcpitstop.com" target="_new">pcpitstop</A>. They analize your system and give you instructions on how to fix/improve it.


<font color=orange>Beam</font color=orange><font color=red> me</font color=red><font color=green> up</font color=green><font color=blue> Scotty</font color=blue>

 

[Lucol]

That is very odd then, it shouldn't be that slow, it should at least hit 17000 or more int SiSoft Sandra. I've got a WD 20GB 7200RPM drive hooked up to a VIA MVP4 chipset running at ATA 66 and the drive is ATA 100, and it scores 21000 in Sandra. How full is your drive, have you defragmented, SP'd your Win2K to at least SP1, have Antivirus Software running or something?

 

[Lucol]

Have you tried updating your BIOS. You can get it here:
http://www.aopen.com/tech/download/mbbios/ax64pro.htm