Slow Hard Drive Question

[cross56]

Hi all, my hard drive seems to be running realy slow. I benchmark 13,800 with Sisoft Sandra. Its a Maxtor ATA133 7200 on the 133 mobo ide controler. Its 80gb and its a little over half full. Why is it so slow. Do the biger drives get that slow when you start filling them up? I get 13,800 with the windows C:\ and about 18,500 on the other D:\ E:\ & F:\ drives. All of which are partitions. Systems specs are below. (my signature)

[TERRIBLETOM]

When you say your hard drive is running slow do you mean your system in general is not performing as it used too?

[cross56]

No, just my HD benchmarks seem to be slow. I had a WD 30GB ATA 100 and I got 23,000. I think that was with SiSoft Sandra 2002 Standard. Maybe they made the results more true to life results. I don't know. But 13,800 and 18,500 seem to be slow. Also it was with 98se that I got 23,000. Maybe 98se is faster with the HD than XP Pro. I don't know.
What do some of yaw get with your Hard Drive test with Sisoft Sandra 2003 Standard? Post'em please.

[PrObLy]

are you by chance using that little program for via chipsets that can drop your cpu temperature by like 8 degrees while idle? I can't remember the name of the program, but I do remember that after I tried it I noticed a huge loss in harddrive performance.....if not then give it a good ol' fashioned defragmenting. Also I've heard that Nero has negative side effects on hard drive performance (my raid drive dropped from 40,000 in sandra to 33,000 randomly)

[Bires]

Originally posted by PrObLy
Also I've heard that Nero has negative side effects on hard drive performance (my raid drive dropped from 40,000 in sandra to 33,000 randomly)

Just having it installed? My RAID array is also a tad slow in WinXP.

As far as the original question...I would d/l HDTach and see if it aggrees with Sandra. Are you running the latest service pack for your OS. Win98 and Win2000 both have IDE cache packages that didn't make it into the release, and I think WinXP SP1 has some hard drive optimizations too.

[sachin tendulkar]

Its probably something in your BIOS setting. Read the attached thread.


Related Threads;
http://www.gotapex.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=54225

[spigidygak]

Just a note, sandra is quite the craptacular thing to use as "benchmarking" software. . .

[Bires]

Originally posted by spigidygak
Just a note, sandra is quite the craptacular thing to use as "benchmarking" software. . .

Ya... Sandra esp. doesn't like RAID arrays...gives artificically low #'s

[cross56]

Thanks for response Chosenfool. I've read your posts about nero and ide performance a number of times. I've got 32GB of free space on my 80GB Maxtor and i'm buying a new 20GB just for my 12GB of mp3s. Once I get them transfored to the 20GB after Christmas, i'm reformating and i'm not going to use Nero any more. I'm going to buy and start useing NTI or probley Roxio. Or possibly windows XP burning. In your exsperience does Roxio or NTI have the draw backs as Nero? Actually i'm not even sure how to use XP burning. How do you burn with XP Pro? Any help on getting started would be great. Thanks for the help Chosenfool.

[cross56]

Thanks again Chosenfool. Do you think XP would be comparable to 98se if I used the fat 32 file system? Or like you said, even with fat 32 you think XP still going to be slower because of the security and stability of the XP structure? I like XP but it doesn't run very well with only 256mb of ram like 98se does. I'm getting more ram after christmas. But I get bad slow downs with XP when i'm surfing and playing mp3s at the same time. Also the networking gets me frustrated sometimes. Like with 98se I cant set a password for all the drives. It just seemed so much easer to set passwords for the drives instead of giveing permission to all files and folders on the computer like with XP. Its just a pain in the butt. Any way thanks, yaw have been great.