AndrewW

Built myself a nice little rig six months ago, and have to say that I've been less than impressed with the hard disk performance. Only just had time to devote a whole weekend to trying to sort the problem, and discovered I was getting a PC Mark 2001 hdd score of 94!!!!

I eventually realised that although the bios was reporting the drive as UDMA5, WinXP had helpfully set the drive up in PIO mode 0 [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

After changing the setting in XP to UDMA5, the hdd score has risen to 900, but when comparing to other similar spec machines I am seeing scores as much as double that ...

http://service.madonion.com/compare?pcm=742821

Anyone have any ideas what the problem might be ?

I just can't figure out why my max transfer rate is 33Mb/s, when the drive is ATA/100, so is the IDE adaptor on the motherboard and I am using a proper shielded 80 pin cable. also there are no other drives no the primary ide channel.

Lastly, these results are after a brand new clean install of XP, patched to SP1.

Thanks,

Andrew.


[Edited by AndrewW - 10/14/2002 3:59:21 AM]

super_si

i built mine and got 600 usually just a 40gb 7,200 rpm drive.

Score doubled when i used a raid array

DominicA

Depending on the motherboard chipset, it could be that you need to install an UDMA driver for it to work at the correct speed. Consult the docs/cd that came with your board or download from their website.

AndrewW

Cheers Dom,

I spent half the weekend looking at the Seagate website, but now I see that there is a utility to set the ATA/66 & ATA/100 modes on seagate drives.

This could very well be my problem, but I'll have to wait till I get home from work to try it out.

Andrew.

suba

ahaa... are you using 80-PIN IDE cable? 40-PIN IDE cable is only good for ATA/33. you need 80-PIN for ATA/66 and above. count the amount of cables in your IDE ribbon.

AndrewW

nice try though ...

Andrew.

TolTec

If you have an Intel chipset MB have a look here

http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/

DominicA

Andrew, as well as the Seagate util, there may be a driver/patch for your motherboard chipset, what motherboard are you using?

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Forget PCmark for giving anything resembling a half accurate HD score mate.

download Sisoft Sandra and run the file system benchmark on there, then report back with what result you get. Way more accurate for drive benchmarking that that load of old sh!te mentioned earlier

For example: 2 of my IBM 120GXP drives running RAID 0(ntfs) get a bit over 54000kB/s on there, the 2 maxtor 740GX drives again with RAID get around 52000kB/s. A 120GXP on it's own gets 31400kB/s here.

As mentioned, I take it that you have the IAA 2.2.2 IDE bus master drivers installed? Peronally, I think from the PCfart score, your drive will most likely be fine. You will probably find that the other guys that you compared your machine with are running RAID like me.

It has been quite a while since Seagate made a particularly quick drive comparared with WD, Maxtor and IBM by the way.

Anyway, Sisoft mate, ignore that other rubbish

http://www.sisoftware.demon.co.uk/sa...html/dload.htm

Cheers,

Nick

AndrewW

Cheers guys.

The seagate utility confirmed that the drive is set to run in UDMA5.

Its an ASUS P4S333 motherboard (sis chipset)

I will have a look at the Sisoft benchmark tonight.

As for the comments about seagate performance, I did a lot of reading before buying the components for the system and at the time (six months ago), this drive seemed to be the pick of the litter.

Thanks,

Andrew.

DominicA

Sis chipset, ah!!! There is a Sis util you need to run to get UDMA working properly(probably

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Not necessarilly Dom, like you said, probably. Some chipsets from SiS made in the last couple of years work perfectly under 2k and XP and some not. Andrew, I take it that under the primary IDE channel properties the drive reports back as UDMA5? By whet you have said I think so. I still really, really don't like SiS though....


Cheers,

Nick

AndrewW

Guys,

Should have given all this information in the first post, but I was at work

ASUS P4S333 Motherboard (sis645 chipset)
512Mb DDR333 Memory
Seagate ST380021A 80Gb ATA/100 Drive
Leadtek Geforce 4 Ti4600 Video Card (just to make you all jealous ...)

There are no drivers visible on the sis or asus websites to enable UDMA.

Yes, the drive shows up as UDMA5 in device manager.

Downloading sisoft sandra now and will report back with results.

Andrew.

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

But are you running a ti4600 alongside a P4 @2.97Ghz??

AndrewW

OK,

Sandra gives me a Drive Index of 21409 kB/s

This compares to 20000 kB/s for the reference ATA/100 5.4K rpm drive and 29200 kB/s for the reference ATA/100 7.2K rpm drive.

Now considering that my drive is ATA/100 7.2K rpm, I think I am still being shortchanged on performance somewhere along the way.

Oh, and the complete breakdown was ...

Buffered Read 70 MB/s
Sequential Read 31 MB/s
Buffered Write 71 MB/s
Sequential Write 31 MB/s
Average access time 10ms

Those sequential rates seem a little low to me ...

Andrew.


[Edited by AndrewW - 10/16/2002 11:08:27 AM]

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

SiS chipset mate. I haven't come across one yet that has decent HD performance, but I haven't used the latest ones from this year. Also, I still don't think that the Seagate is going to be blisteringly fast anyway. Sorry that I can't be of any more help.

Cheers,

Nick.

AndrewW

no worries, thanks for the suggestions anyway.

P4 2.0 Ghz chips are so cheap now that I'm thinking about buying another one and running a dual processor system. I'll make sure I get a board with with a decent ide controller at the same time.

And hey, I'd then have 4.0 Ghz and then I can really win the who'se got the biggest **** competition

Andrew.


[Edited by AndrewW - 10/16/2002 11:22:00 AM]

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Erm, no, because virtually no normal user software can even vaguely use 2 cpu's correctly, so that would not be the case I am afraid

Not 100% sure on this, but you may well need a pair of P4 2ghz xeon's to run those in SMP. Not sure though.

Cheers,

Nick

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

I think you can run standard ones actually.....

suba

you need xeon CPUs to run SMP and on intel 860 chipset. you can only run "normal" AMD athlon XP CPUs in SMP.

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Forget it, a muppet to my right said that, then retracted the statement, so I was right

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Actually, suba, as you probably well know, it all depends on the the AMD motherboards running them. Most of the time you will need to modify the XP cpu physically to set the MP tag to on for motherboards to allow you to run.

Cheers,

Nick