HD Bench Test Problem

Hi, I am having a problem bench marking my hard drives. I have a Maxtor 6 l200M0 on SATA, a Maxtor 6b300R0 on Primary IDE and WDC WD1200BB as IDE slave. I downloaded Performance Test, Fresh Diagnostics and Sandra Bench32. (I found the link to your illustrious group on the Performance Test site.)

Fresh Diagnostics shows my average read speed as over a gigabyte per second on both my SATA and IDE drives. This reading seems just a teeny bit high! Performance Test shows my sequential read at about 900 Mbytes per second on both my SATA and IDE drives. I am also getting ridiculously high readings on random seeks.

Sandra shows my max read on the SATA at 51 Mbytes/sec and 18 Mbytes/sec on my IDE. This might be realistic, though I had hopped for a little better performance from UDMA6. However, Sandra shows my max write on the SATA at 107 Mbytes/sec and Max write on IDE at 59 Mbytes/sec. I don’t see why my write speed should be two or three times my read speed. I don’t think I believe those numbers either.

I’m thinking, on my system, maybe the software is reading from some kinda’ cache or buffer or something and mistaking that for a HD read. I have a MSI ATX Mainboard PT880 Neo Series dual channel DDR with a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor.

Is there some setting I need to change in Windows or the Bios to get a real reading? Also, do you guys know of any other good bench mark software?

Thanks.