Slow hard drive in windows XP

[steves]

Slow hard drive in windows XP and 2000

I have a 7200 rpm ATA66 10 gig Western Digital hard drive that reports
very slow speeds in both SiSandra and HD Tach.


Netvista and Windows XP -

In Sandra 2004 the drive index is: 4102 kB/s


In HD Tach the :

Sequential Speed is about 5.8 MB/s.

Random Access Time is 15.8 ms

Read Burst Speed is 6.4 MB/s.


Why is this drive so slow. I've run this drive in a Netvista (Windows
XP, SiS 630 chipset) ) and a home build box (Windows 2000, ALi
chipset). In 2000 it was much slower than the numbers above. Both
OSs claim to have the proper drivers for the chipset (and MB support
for ATA66, etc). I am using the prober cable with the proper BIOS
settings.

Maybe Western Digital just made a slow drive (WD102BA) or is this a
chipset problem ?

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/legacy/Legacy.asp?r=2

Shows it as an ata66, 7200 rpm, w/ 2MB cache.



In my other 2000 system with my Intel chipset (815) my IBM drive come
in right where it should be (Sandra 2004 only). So, I'm guessing
these "other" chipsets don't have true ATA66 support...




thanks, please post reply.

 

[Wayne Morgan]

Did you download WD's diagnostic utility to see if the drive was bad or if
someone locked it down to a slower speed (WD's UDMA utility)?

 

[Scapaflow]

I don't know if this will help, but I have a Epox 8kha+/Win2000pro
machine. The Epox board uses the VIA KT266A chipset and harddrive
performance suffers significantly if I do not install the VIA IDE
drivers for the mobo.

This is at odds with others experiences with Win2000--most preferring
to go with the IDE drivers Windows installs and not bothering with
the VIA IDE drivers. Win2000 boot-up time is 90 seconds with the VIA
drivers, about 2 min 30 seconds with the Windows default drivers.

I don't know if a similar effect may be taking place with your ALI
chipset. This assumes, of course, that you've not installed the ALI
IDE drivers, assuming they exist in discrete form.
Dave

 

[Paul L]

go into device mgr, double-click your ata controller , goto primary ide ch
props, goto advanced and see if transfer mode shows 'dma if available' is
set