ATA-100 drive only ~14000kB/s in Sisoft Bench

[Ed Crismond]

Someone I know is having slower than expected performance on a Gateway
E-4600. This system has an i850 chipset, Pentium 4 1.8Ghz CPU, 256MB PC800
RDRAM, and a Western Digital WD800BB-53CCB0 hard disk. This WD hard disk is
a 7200 RPM ATA-100 drive, and I'm assuming that the Intel board in this
thing has an ATA-100 IDE controller.

Programs load slower than expected, so I ran Sisoft Sandra disk performance
benchmark, and it usually comes up with about 14kB/s. Should I not get at
least 26-27kB/s?

The latest Intel Application Accelerator is installed, and it is showing
that the controller the HD is connected to is set at Ultra DMA 5. I rolled
back to the stock MS driver that installs with WinXP Home and got the same
results, with the device manager showing the controller set at Ultra DMA 5.

Before I even installed Sandra, I defragged and cleaned up. I've shut down
anti-virus processes and other background applications before running the
Sandra benchmark. I have booted with a WD Diag floppy, and run the quick
test with no errors reported. I did not run the extended test, because it
recommended backing up data, there is a few CDs worth of data on here right
now.

Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Ed

 

[Ed Crismond]

Programs load slower than expected, so I ran Sisoft Sandra disk
performance benchmark, and it usually comes up with about 14kB/s. Should I
not get at least 26-27kB/s?

That should read, "...and it usually comes up with about 14,000kB/s. Should
I not get at
least 26000-27000kB/s?"

 

[Bob Willard]

That should read, "...and it usually comes up with about 14,000kB/s. Should
I not get at
least 26000-27000kB/s?"

Sandra is suspect w.r.t. HD performance. Get HDtach and run it to see if the
HD and the path to memory are up to snuff. For HDtach, go to www.simplisoft.com;
and note that the new V3 is only for XP; you'll need a V2.x version of HDtach
if you run W9x.

 

[Ed Crismond]

Sandra is suspect w.r.t. HD performance. Get HDtach and run it to see if
the
HD and the path to memory are up to snuff. For HDtach, go to
www.simplisoft.com;
and note that the new V3 is only for XP; you'll need a V2.x version of
HDtach
if you run W9x.
--

I downloaded, installed, and ran HDtach. The average read of the WD800BB was
36.5 MB/s. This is much closer to what I would expect, although it is a
little lower than the WD800BB benchmark comparison that came with HDtech.
Maybe the comparison bench was higher because of other components in that
system? Like the Athlon 3200+ on an Abit NF7-S?

Maybe all this Gateway system needs is a little more memory to make it
snappier.

Thanks.

Ed

 

[Bob Willard]

I downloaded, installed, and ran HDtach. The average read of the WD800BB was
36.5 MB/s. This is much closer to what I would expect, although it is a
little lower than the WD800BB benchmark comparison that came with HDtech.
Maybe the comparison bench was higher because of other components in that
system? Like the Athlon 3200+ on an Abit NF7-S?

Maybe all this Gateway system needs is a little more memory to make it
snappier.

Thanks.

Ed

Storage Review measured read transfer rates on that HD at 36 MB/s on the
outer cylinders and 24 MB/s on the inner cylinders. You should get about
the same with HDtach if you run it nearly standalone; I'd count anything
in the range of -10% to +5% as the same.

You have plenty of RAM for HDtach. But, for non-benchmark use, 256MB on
a PC running XP is pretty minimal: OK for one app at a time, but likely to
bog down if you multi-task. For most XP use, 512MB is fine; more if you
edit photos or video or audio.