Hard drive dragging new system?

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jetstar88

How much of a drag can an old hard drive put on a fast chip?

I bought a new case, motherboard, and chip (2.6Ghz), and added two old
6 gig hard drives. Despite the age of the Hard Drives, I expected to
see some kind of speed up considering I was going from a 200Mhz to
2.6Ghz CPU and from 64 MB Ram to 512. I knew that the speed up
wouldn't be as dramatic as if I had not kept the old hard drives, but
am disappointed in the continued lethargy of my system.

The system was already slow before I moved it to the new PC box, but I
still anticipated some improvement. So, if anyone out there knows,
just how much can the older hard drives cancel out the new CPU's
power/speed? Or should I be looking for other causes?

Thanks for any feedback/info,
Larry
 
jetstar88 said:
How much of a drag can an old hard drive put on a fast chip?
Click to expand...

some things (startup?) might be so dependant on disk speed that it would
seem that way.

the key thing is which operations or programs you want to speed up. you can
build a system to target a certain kind of performance.

fwiw, i think if you tried something very cpu dependant (like folding@home)
you'd see a big improvement.
 
(e-mail address removed) (jetstar88) astounded us with:
How much of a drag can an old hard drive put on a fast chip?

I bought a new case, motherboard, and chip (2.6Ghz), and added two old
6 gig hard drives. Despite the age of the Hard Drives, I expected to
see some kind of speed up considering I was going from a 200Mhz to
2.6Ghz CPU and from 64 MB Ram to 512. I knew that the speed up
wouldn't be as dramatic as if I had not kept the old hard drives, but
am disappointed in the continued lethargy of my system.

The system was already slow before I moved it to the new PC box, but I
still anticipated some improvement. So, if anyone out there knows,
just how much can the older hard drives cancel out the new CPU's
power/speed? Or should I be looking for other causes?

Thanks for any feedback/info,
Larry
Click to expand...

Your new rig is sitting there waiting for the hard drives to feed it data.
Your hard disks probably run at UDMA 33 if you're lucky, also, they are
probably bloated with crap in your registry and win.ini and system.ini.
Back up your data and format the disks, re-install your O/S and apps, or
get your hands on a shiny new hard disk to see a real improvement.
 
i missed that it might be an old install. i agree that a re-install or new
disk is the best way to get a cruft-free system.

i also like to run benchmarks as i change my system, before/after.
sometimes you get surprises. i can't remember the exact details right now,
but i had an older supermicro system that i'd taken from udma 33 (mobo), up
to a fastrack raid (100?), and back down to a single higher speed drive
(66/100?) on a pci controller. i was surprised to see lower disk throughput
on the last single-drive/pci setup than i'd had in the beginning ... so i
went back to the mobo connecter and went faster again.

i thought that showed that the pci bridge/whatever was slower than the other
mobo route to the on-board controller ... but in retrospect i can think of a
couple other things. maybe i should have been smarter about my
bios/interrupt settings (i don't know much about that, so i let it all
auto-detect), and maybe it was a linux driver issue on the single-drive/pci
setup.

main point anyway is to run some benchmarks so you know when you are gaining
and when you are losing.
 
do you have DMA enabled?
Are the drives on 80 pin IDE cables?
Are theses newly formatted and partitioned drives?
Is your Main board have a via chipset? Via 4in1 's done? All mainboard updates done?
 
How much of a drag can an old hard drive put on a fast chip?

I bought a new case, motherboard, and chip (2.6Ghz), and added two old
6 gig hard drives. Despite the age of the Hard Drives, I expected to
see some kind of speed up considering I was going from a 200Mhz to
2.6Ghz CPU and from 64 MB Ram to 512. I knew that the speed up
wouldn't be as dramatic as if I had not kept the old hard drives, but
am disappointed in the continued lethargy of my system.

The system was already slow before I moved it to the new PC box, but I
still anticipated some improvement. So, if anyone out there knows,
just how much can the older hard drives cancel out the new CPU's
power/speed? Or should I be looking for other causes?
Click to expand...
Look for other causes. Make sure the drives are running in DMA mode
instead of PIO mode in Windows.
 
It's not so much specific applications that are slow. In fact once
fully booted up and at the desktop, things are relatively quick.
Opening folders, etc. But initial start of the system includes a lot
of thrashing and noise and so forth.

The screens at first fly by at lightening speed as I had expected. The
display of memory available and CPU speed and device detection are
almost too fast to read. Comparable to my 1.6 Ghz system in another
room (the new one is actually for my teen age daughter). But once the
Windows splash screen appears, its a slow boat to China.

I realize there is a ton of junk on the disk, and had intended to
start her system over from scratch within a few days to weeks anyway.
In fact, I have an extra 80 gig drive on hand that I planned to add
also. And I understand that the system will only be as fast as its
weakest component will allow (in this case the hard drives). Still, I
thought there would be some initial speed up even with the old hard
drives in place.

Oops... am rambling. Sorry.

Main concern was (despite reasonably low prices for hard drives) in
trying to keep the total initial cost of the system low, was there
anything else that could be causing the bottleneck before I remove the
drives.

By the way... am running Win98, which again, I plan to upgrade to XP.
But in trying to keep the cost and number of variables down had
delayed that too.

As I'm writing this I think part of my reason for wanting to see an
increase in speed with old hard drives in place was to justify my
purchase. Cause if simply adding a new hard drive or two would have
sped things up dramatically then a new system wouldn't have been
needed. It's purchase would have been on the horizon within months
anyway. Just that it could have been postponed.

Thanks for replying,
Larry
 
It's not so much specific applications that are slow. In fact once
fully booted up and at the desktop, things are relatively quick.
Opening folders, etc. But initial start of the system includes a lot
of thrashing and noise and so forth.

The screens at first fly by at lightening speed as I had expected. The
display of memory available and CPU speed and device detection are
almost too fast to read. Comparable to my 1.6 Ghz system in another
room (the new one is actually for my teen age daughter). But once the
Windows splash screen appears, its a slow boat to China.
Click to expand...
Well that is indicative of a systray full of all sorts of crap from the
useful clock to the not needed startup itemss from a plethora of things
such as Realplayer autoupdate, Nero CD check etc etc etc.

TBH I think the time for a clean install is long overdue.
 
It's not so much specific applications that are slow. In fact once
fully booted up and at the desktop, things are relatively quick.
Opening folders, etc. But initial start of the system includes a lot
of thrashing and noise and so forth.
Click to expand...

You mean disk access. You can't get around the fact that Windows and
apps will ask the disk for data, especially at Windows startup and
especially if you've got lots of apps (including hidden ones) which
start when Windows starts.
I realize there is a ton of junk on the disk, and had intended to
start her system over from scratch within a few days to weeks anyway.
In fact, I have an extra 80 gig drive on hand that I planned to add
also. And I understand that the system will only be as fast as its
weakest component will allow (in this case the hard drives). Still, I
thought there would be some initial speed up even with the old hard
drives in place.
Click to expand...

If the 80 gig drive is faster than the old 6 gig hard drives, I'd do a
clean install on the 80 gig, copy anything important over from the 6
gig drives, then leave the old 6 gig drives in the junk drawer in case
the 80 gig drive dies an early death.

Jeff
 
On 1 Jan 2004 22:27:29 -0800 In this world we created
How much of a drag can an old hard drive put on a fast chip?
Click to expand...

Loads.
Hard drives and Cdrom/DVD drives are the slowest parts of the system
for data transfers and as PCs are DOS(Disk Operating Systems) then
they will drag down all operations.
don't cripple you new CPU and RAM with these old drives IMHO.
HTH :)




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Get rid of them and stick a cheap 40gig in or something. They arent worth
messing around with !
 
It was the hard drives. I was mistaken about the newer drive though.
It's only a 40 gig, not an 80. Still, plenty of room, and although I
did not remove the 6 gig senior citizens, I installed the 40 gig and
the mere fact that it's the primary master now has removed the
bottleneck and sped things up dramatically. No more thrashing around
and everything is quieter.

I had intended to add the 40 gig later to store backup images of the
smaller 6 gig rather than the curent setup. But for now, 12 gigs (the
2 ancient 6 gigs) is enough backup space, and eventually I'll toss a
brand new 80gig or larger drive in there and toss the old ones.

Thank you to everyone who replied. Every bit of info and perspective
helps when you've been looking at a problem so much that you're no
longer objective about it.

Larry
 
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