Strange FAT32/NTFS performance problem in XP?

[ola.theander]

Dear subscribers

I have a client with a strange disk performance problem. The client
uses a Dell Latitude D420 with to separate partitions, one C:\ (fat32)
which is the Dell maintenance partition and one E:\ (NTFS) which is
the Windows-partition including documents etc.

My client have complained that the computers seems slow thus I ran
some tests and it seems like the disk performance is sub-standard. The
computer is equipped with 1.5 GB of memory so it's not due to disk
swapping or anything like that. The strange thing is that it seems
like it's only the NTFS-partition that is slow. I used the tool
DiskBench to measure the read/write performance of the disk and it's
roughly a factor of 4 -5 in speed difference between the FAT32 and
the NTFS-partition, to the FAT32-partitions advantage. The average
write speed for the FAT32 partition is about 15 - 20 MB/s which is
quite normal. Performing an identical test on the NTFS-partition, the
performance is about 2 - 3 MB/s. Note that it's the same physical hard
disk, it's just two different partitions.

A colleague of the client has a virtually identical D420 (they were
bought roughly at the same time) but the performance on this computer
is normal, i.e. about 15 - 20 MB/s independent of the partition
tested.

In total there are in total three D420 at the client's office and two
of them suffer from this performance problem. I've been in contact
with Dell support but they don't have any clue about what's wrong. As
far as I can see all drivers are installed, DMA enabled etc.

Any help on this issue would be most welcome.

Kind regards, Ola Theander

 

[RalfG]

The type of partition shouldn't have a bearing on write speed, at least not
to that extreme degree. I would look for software, possibly a background
app or service, or even malware, as the cause of the problem on the 2
affected machines. Try doing your hd benchmarks in Safe Mode or MSCONFIG
diagnostic mode to see if it gets different results.