More on disk speed problems

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Carlyle-Clarke
  • Start date Start date
J

John Carlyle-Clarke

I have more detail on the problem I posted before*. ( XP home, 256MB
RAM, Duron 1.3GHz, Nvidia nForce chipset. )

I have access to an identical PC at work as my own one, so I tried an
experiment.

I was using performance test to benchmark the drives.

I tried the work PC with my drive installed as a slave. I tried the
work PC with just its own drive. I found that in both cases I got
reasonable speeds from the drives.

I then tried my PC with the drive from the Work system installed as a
slave, and got much slower speeds from both drives (about 1/4 of the
speed basically).

I then swapped the jumpers so that my PC booted from the work drive,
with my drive as a slave. The benchmark now gave good speeds again.

My conclusion was that the speed problem is a software/OS problem, not
hardware. Does this seem reasonable?

Can anyone suggest what I can look for to cure this? (Short of an OS
re-install, preferably).

Note that the work PC runs a single application, and is a much cleaner
system than my home PC!

Thanks in advance.



* http://www.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
&threadm=Xns94107D9FCD744johncceuroplacercouk%40192.168.1.69&rnum=1
&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26selm%
3DXns94107D9FCD744johncceuroplacercouk%2540192.168.1.69
 
A master drive will always be faster than a slave drive. The slave drive is
using the control of the master drive, instead of its own (hence: slave
drive).

In order to make sure that we get the max speed for the drives (Ultra DMA
speeds) we need to install the chipset IDE driver. Windows does not have an
up to date IDE driver for each model of chipset on the market. Make sure
you have installed the correct, up to date chipset driver (FORCEWARE for
nForce chipsets). Also, we need to use the Ultra DMA 80 pin IDE cables,
instead of the standard 40 pin cables.

Y.
 
Hi Yves, thanks for the reply.

I didn't notice a big difference between master and slave, although I know
that the benchmark software is not very accurate. I don't have the exact
figures here, but going from memory, and taking read speed as an example
(the read, write and random seek + RW were about in proportion), I got this:

Work PC with its own drive as master: 8 MB/s
Work PC with its drive as master and mine as slave: Master 8MB/s, Slave
9MB/s

My PC with its own drive as master: 2MB/s
My PC with its own drive as master and work PC as slave: Master 2MB/s, Slave
2MB/s
My PC with work PC's drive as master and its own as slave, (i.e. booting
from work PC's drive): Master 8MB/s, Slave 8MB/s.

The drives are the same model, but set up differently. Work machine is 18GB
split into 3 FAT32 partitions, mine is one 18GB NTFS partition.

The work machine is a basic clean XP Home install, with no special drivers
(and very few apps or patches installed).

Mine is a typical home PC - lots of apps, up to date on patches.

Both have 80 way UDMA ATA cables, installed correctly.

I also tried installing some nVidia drivers on mine (nForce_2.45
_WinXP2K_WHQL_english.exe) to see if it would help, but it didn't.

Can you suggest anything else to try?

Thanks again!
 
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