HDD Performance Issues

[M700Police]

Hello. I am having some performance problems with my hard drive. In the SiSoft Sandra HDD performance benchmark my drive is coming up with some VERY low scores. I have a WD 1200FP 120 gb drive with 8mb cache and Sandra is telling me that it is performing about the same as a regular 60gb drive 7200rpm drive. Im running XP Pro with NTFS. I had a IBM deskstar 60 gb 60GXP and i was getting a poor score with that as well. The IBM drive started to make some funny noises so I figured it was time to replace it. I used PowerQuest Drive Copy 4 to move everyonthing over to the new drive and it went off without a hitch. I just used TweakXP to turn on UDMA66 mode in the registry hoping that would solve my problem but....no luck. The other strange thing is that before I moved my system over to the new drive, I installed the 1200FP as a slave drive to the IBM and ran Sandra on it. While in this configuration it was performing right where it should. Anyone know what the heck is going on here? Its driving me nuts! Thanks in advance....this is a great site.

One more thing....I went into the properties of the drive and into policies and both options are greyed out but the second one is checked. This means that write caching should be enabled correct?

 

[4Ryan6]

That WD drive is either ATA100 or ATA133 isn't it, is your M/B capable of running at that speed, I didn't see any mention of the M/B name or how old it is. If the M/B is an older model it may not be capable of running the faster hardrives, but you can purchase an ATA100 or ATA133 PCI card that will allow you to get the maximum performance out of it, even with an older M/B. Make sure UDMA function is activated in the CMOS setup, for the max performance your M/B is capable of giving you. Don't run those Benchmarking programs too often, some of them will tell you they can cause hardware failures if theres any weaknesses at all. Hope this helps some Ryan.

Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

 

[gaviota]

Check the jumpers on your HD. My WD 1200FP performed poorly until I realized that the jumper was not properly set.

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[lhgpoobaa]

correct.
write caching enabled.
UDMA enabled in the ata channel.
latest chipset drivers
correct jumper (IIRC the WD drives have two settings, master with slave and master alone)

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