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

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ed Crismond
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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 said:
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?
Click to expand...

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

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.
 
Bob Willard said:
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.
--
Click to expand...

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
 
Ed said:
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
Click to expand...

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.
 
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