Help with slow hd's ?


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Hello all,

I have a small prob here I need some help with pls.

I have been testing my pc on www.pcpitstop.com and keep getting low hd benchmarks as shown here --

-----------------------------(Drive C)----------(Drive D)-------------(Drive G)

disks.jpg

I try and keep my drives defragged - latest drivers etc - if someone can help getting the drives performance up pls it would be appreciated.

Btw Im using Win XP with 256mb ram and an athlon 1.2 on a Abit KT7 motherboard - so I have I think enough horsepower to be getting better results from my drives.

Thanx for any help offered ;)

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lo Sphere :) Thx for replying.

I have 3 hds at the moment running -

a 4gb one - 5200 rpm

a 5 gig one - 5200 rpm

& a 20 gig one - 7200 rpm

In the piccy I added in my first post the left hand side is the 4 gig drive - the centre one is the 5 gig drive and the 20 gig drive is the right hand side results.

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On top of everyone elses comments, you also would want to ensure that DMA is enabled on your IDE channels as well as having write caching enabled as well. Also, make sure that you are using a ATA66/100/133 IDE Cable for the hard drives, this more so applies to the 20 gig hd then the 4 and 5 gig HD since I would imagine they are old and don't support new ATA standards. You might want to consider investing in a new hard drive as well, I know this is not what you want to hear, but hard drives are real cheap nowadays (an 40gb 7200rpm seagate will cost you around $35-$50 US).

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Thx for the reply BananaMan,

Yep dma is enabled for all drives - I even went out and bought a ATA 66/100 ide cable to enure I had the right gear.

The 4 & 5 gig drives are at Ultra dma 2 and the 20 gig is at Ultra dma 4.

Yet I still get these slow speeds :( :s

I have a feeling its down to the caching - is there any way to enable better caching for hd's ? Or better settings for hds in bios or windows Xp.

Thx for the help so far and any help offered :)

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Originally posted by Robbo

Thx for the reply BananaMan,

Yep dma is enabled for all drives - I even went out and bought a ATA 66/100 ide cable to enure I had the right gear.

The 4 & 5 gig drives are at Ultra dma 2 and the 20 gig is at Ultra dma 4.

Yet I still get these slow speeds :( :s

I have a feeling its down to the caching - is there any way to enable better caching for hd's ? Or better settings for hds in bios or windows Xp.

Thx for the help so far and any help offered :)

No worries robbo, happy to help.

Write caching is enabled by default, but you might want to check it anyway if you haven't already. Just open Device Manager, right click your hard-drive and click Properties. Click the Policies tab, and you'll see the tick box down the bottom for write caching. Note, these instructions apply to Windows XP, it's probably around the same for Windows 2000, but for 9x/Me I wouldn't know off the top of my head where to access those specific controls.

As for the BIOS settings, click here for a guide on what BIOS settings should be set for optimum performance, in particular pay attention to IDE prefetch mode, IDE HDD Block Mode, IDE 32-bit transfer mode, as these should all be set to enabled IF you're system supports them as they will all improve performance. And, of course, ensure that Onboard IDE-1 controller and Onboard IDE-2 controller have DMA enabled (which I'm guessing they are since Windows is reporting that you're accessing your hard drives under UDMA).

Hope that helps!

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Thx again BananaMan ;)

I will read through that web page link to see if I get any tips there :)

I have a feeling a fresh install of Win XP may be in order soon though :ermm: :s I haven't done a fresh install in ages - may help if I can't tweak the drives correctly.

Thx........

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