Slow Hardrive

[korky45]

A performance test at PCpitstop inicated a slow HDD, possibly caused by a cached speed of 175.99 megabytes per second.

For comparison, systems with the same CPU, clock speed, and memory size as mine have an average cached speed of 298 MB/s and an uncached speed of 7.07 MB/s.

I've seached everywhere for a solution to this problem - can anyone shed light please.

The Processor is an Athlon XP 2200+ with 512 Ram and an 80gig HDD

Thanks:confused:

[Sylvander]

I suggest you go to the website of the HDD’s manufacturer and download their diagnostic software to test the HDD.

See if it can detect anything amiss that might explain this.

Is Direct Memory Access enabled?
Does the motherboard support the full ATA rating of the drive?
My HDD does not have it’s full ATA rating enabled [it’s done using software on a floppy] because my motherboard doesn’t support it, so it works below it’s full capability.

[jabarnutcase]

One of the things Sylvander mentioned Is a biggie I have found-
Make sure your DMA is enabled!
On more than one Install of XP, I have found it chose to disable DMA by default, and was running in "PIO only"" mode.
You can check this in device manager under controllers.

(Not sure what OS you're using, but definitely check your DMA)

[korky45]

thanks for the advice - I'll have a look on the HDD manufacturers site but I am not optimistic. The OS is Win 98SE and DMA is enabled for all the drives. This was my 1st port of call. I've also set a fixed swop file size and seems to have helped a little, but I do feel the Cache speed is the problem and not the HDD. There must be something in the way the memory is configured that is causing a blockage.

[Sylvander]

Have you checked in "BIOS Features Setup" to see that the Level 1 & Level 2 caches are both enabled?

[korky45]

I've downloaded a nice bit of diagnostic software for the manu. website http://www.hgst.com/ It can be used for testing and analysing any hardrive.

My HDD is OK and I have just set the SWOP file up to a fixed size and this has made a good improvement. I'll continue to make adjustments here until I get the best performance. I am taking your advice and leaving well alone after this final experiment. Thanks eveybody who helped.

[mjc]

I would also take the PC Pitstop results with a grain of salt...they are not always accurate..the best with them, or any benchmarking utility is to run multiple times.

I have found that their results on drives can vary greatly from run to run and how soon after I have defragged my drive.

[malcore]

The comparisons on PCPitstop do not take the Operating System into account.

XP does a much better job at memory management and caching than Win9X/Me. I would wager that most of the results that are much higher than yours are from 2000 or XP machines.