unusually LOW hard drive performance

[yellowood]

I benchmarked my hard drive using SiSoft, it gave the following performance compared to other drives:

My hard drive: 2004
UDMA66: 13000
UDMA33: 8000
UDMA: 6500
EIDE 4GB: 3500

My system is

Maxtor DiamondMax 60GB
AM7266 running 1.4 GHz TB, BIOS 1005
512 RAM
video 8500DV
win2k + SP2, via 4in1 4.35

So As you can see my ATA100 is very poor performer. I'm thinking I should be getting 17000+ not 2007!

So I downloaded powermax from the maxtor site and it passed all of the tests.

Even though I updated the BIOS and the drivers I'm thinking it might still be a driver issue. Could it be cable? the drive itself? I'm hoping it's a software solution.

Thanks for any help.

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by yellowood on 12/16/01 04:56 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[flamethrower205]

Ok, is the cable u are using an ATA100 cable (u can tell if teh wires are really small, and there's many of them)? In addition, is DMA enabled, and does it say its functioning in UDMA 5 or ATA100 mode in Bios and Windows?
PS: Your sig is so true=)

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

 

[yellowood]

Yes they are ATA100 cables (small wires) and UDMA is enabled in BIOS. As for windows 2000, the transfer mode is set to "DMA if available" in the device manager.

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[flamethrower205]

Ok, in that case, dl HDtach. U'll need a serial # to get it working under NT based, but just go to www.astalavista.com and find one (or search in google- whichever one tickles ur arse). Then, report ur scores.

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

 

[AMD_Man]

lol, beware of porn, astalavista is a crack search engine.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[camieabz]

I assume the "mass storage controller" drivers are loaded?

Check in the device manager.

<b><font color=blue>~scribble~</font color=blue></b> <A HREF="http://www.ud.com/home.htm" target="_new">Help cure cancer.</A>

 

[yellowood]

So after filtering through all the porn, I found everything i needed and ran HDtach. The scores I got are

Random access time: 13.3ms
Read burst speed: 2.0mbps

I think this is low of you compare to the scores from THG.

As for a mass strorage controller driver, My hard drive is connected to the IDE controller of the motherboard not on a add-on card.

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[AMD_Man]

So after filtering through all the porn

lol, I warned you. I bet you loved it!!!

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[flamethrower205]

Oh, damn, something's wrong. What else is connected to ur IDE cable?

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

 

[yellowood]

Sadly, nothing else is connected to the IDE cable.

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[flamethrower205]

Then ur hdd may just be screwed. Try returning it.

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

 

[flamethrower205]

Oh, wait, I forgot (haven't used win2k in a month now), install service pack 2- if that doesn't work, then return

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

 

[yellowood]

SP2 is installed and so is VIA 4in1 v4.35 IDE drivers.

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[yellowood]

guess I may very well return it.

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[flamethrower205]

When I was w/ XP, I had similar prob, but SP2 fixed that.

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

 

[yellowood]

I wonder... Has anybody ever installed SP2 twice on a system. Would that be worth a shot? (a very long shot)

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[yellowood]

I just thought of another thing, I'm still using FAT32 for the file system (I upgraded from 98se). Would converting to NTFS make a difference?

-----
It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[flamethrower205]

Try it- it can't hurt (in response to both).

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?

 

[yellowood]

Well my hard drive performance is now at a more respectable 30mbps on HDtach 2.61.

It all started when I saw a post over at amdmb about a similar problem of very low hard drive performance. This guy played with the udma setting of his hard drive using a utility from the manufacturer. So I tried something similar using the udmaupdt.exe tool from maxtor.

This would prove to be a very unwise decision.

To make a long story short, my hard drive would not boot anymore. I used fdisk, format and 24 hours later, I had everything reinstalled from scratch and the performance is much better.

What was causing the low performance? Certainly not the hard drive itself or the cables. This was not a surprise since my drive had passed all of Maxtor's powermax tests. I'm guessing drivers. Perhaps I didn't properly uninstall a driver before updating or something to that effect.

One thing is for sure i'm getting pretty good at reinstalling windows.

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It's a shame we have only one soul to sell...

 

[flamethrower205]

Lol. Well, this is windows ur dealing w/- shiit happens that is unexplaneable. I'm great at installing Windows as well I have installed it over 1000 times (not an exageration).

What if your life moved.....2 inches to the left?