Whats wrong with my HDD?

[bigpoppapumpg]

In pcmark 2001 (cpu 4325,mem 2584,hdd 621) someone told me that the hdd score was VERY VERY LOW. Does anyone know if it is indeed very low, and tell me why cuz my HDD is supposed to be pretty fast.

My system is this: ece k7s5a mobo w/sis 735 chipset, retail amd XP 1800+, 256 MB DDR ram, Maxtor 7200 rpm ata 133 HDD running off an att 133 pci card with a promise chipset,gainward geforce 4 ti4200,creative live value soundcard. the HDD is configured to master on IDE 1 of the ata 133 pci card. a 12x burner is master on IDE 2 of the pci card, and a 32x burner is master on IDE 1 of the mobo. Win xp pro is freshly installed so fragmentation shouldn't be an issue. HOWEVER, the HDD has 2 partitions... the primary is 3 GB where the OS is installed, the second partition is where all programs and data is stored. Partition 1 is formatted with NTFS and partition 2 is a holdover from a previous win 98se installation and is formatted with fat32. Not sure if that would make any difference. The only think I can think is that having the drive on the pci card is messing up the perfromance. so why is my HDD so slow???

 

[r2k]

Have you enabled the DMA mode in BIOS and Windows?

 

[bigpoppapumpg]

yes, dma mode 6 for the hdd and dma mode 2 for the cd rom on the pci card.

 

[PCcashCow]

what is you channel config like?

It seems that every time I reboot my wallet gets smaller.

 

[bigpoppapumpg]

im sorry, channel config??? that terminology is unfamiliar.

 

[PCcashCow]

sorry what i mean is that what is the order of the deviced you have connected to the ribbons, anydevice like the annyoing cd-roms @ udma 33, that are attached to a hdd worng will somtimes casue the optimal setting to be dma 33 at the least.

It seems that every time I reboot my wallet gets smaller.

 

[bigpoppapumpg]

thought I posted that initially. the HD is master on ide 1 of the ata 133 pci card using an ata 133 cable running in dma 6 mode. a 12x burner is master on ide 2 of the pci card running in dma 2. a 32x burnder is master on ide 1 of the mobo.

maybe someone can suggest to me a way to actually determine if my HD perforance is actually slow. I'm only taking the word of one guy who commented on the results of pc mark 2002 benchmark.

 

[PCcashCow]

Just one suggestion .. download the diag tools from the maker of the hdd, and run all the tests it offers (not format!) and see what the read write I/O is based on the speccs of the hdd.

-Tim

It seems that every time I reboot my wallet gets smaller.

 

[bigpoppapumpg]

thanks tim thats a good idea. I've actually not looked at the maxtor website yet, hopefully they do have those utilities. I just feel like i bought a pretty fast hd so I should get pretty good performance. wonder how much better it would be with another one of these in raid.