Poor harddrive performance, very odd

[Epoch]

I have an 60GB IBM hard-drive (60gxp) running on an ASUS DDR Motherboard. I have 1gig of PC2700 RAM. The drive is a primary master and is the drive that has windows xp installed on.

The problems I am having is to do with the seek time and the CPU utilisation of the drive. I installed the 4-in-1 drivers off the CD that came with the motherboard. After this I went to the properties for the IDE channel in the windows device manager and it reported that channel was running at UDMA5. So I figured it would all be good, then I ran HD Tach on the drive and got the following result:

http://www.blueshine.co.uk/hdtach.jpg

As can be seen, the performance isnt particularly good with respect to seek time, sequential read and CPU utilisation (which has gone up to 49% in another test I ran). Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks,

Simon

 

[lhgpoobaa]

possibly old Chipset drivers. Usually the drivers supplied on the CD are rather old.
Its best going to a weebsite like <A HREF="http://www.viaarena.com" target="_new">http://www.viaarena.com</A> and getting the latest ones, then ensuring that UDMA is enabled before and after reboot

<b>Damn War! I'm too young to watch other people die!</b>
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[lhgpoobaa]

P.S. i dont much like the look of your transfer graph or seek times either.

Either you are running stuff in the background that is influencing the tranfer results OR the drive seems to have many remapped bad sectors...
when you repeat hdtach, are all the downward spikes allways in the same location?

note: IBM drives, particulary of the 75GXP or 60GXP family have shocking reliability records.

<b>Damn War! I'm too young to watch other people die!</b>
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[Epoch]

OK. I wasnt running anything in the background. I have gone through process entries in the task manager. I have the newest via drivers. The harddrive was fine before the winxp reinstall. I cannot think of anything that would cause this. It is crazy that I am using 45% of the CPU to do hard drive transfers. The downward spikes are not always in the same location.

Is there anyway to check for remapped sectors? To be honest I dont think it is that because, as I said, the drive was fine before. I have run HD Tach on all my drives (I have 3 in total). The CPU utilisation is always horrible.

This is really annoying because the performance of the system is now really awful.

Anyone any more ideas?

Simon