Help, unexplained slow harddrive.
 

Hi. I have had my computer set up for some months now and noticed that my HD performance seems to be so lacking. I got Sisoft Sandra and ran the HD benchmark test and scored a meager 4700kb when 10 and 30 gib ATA66 HD's were scoring around 10,000-15,000 kb. I know something is wrong but I can't islote the problem. I updated to the latest via driver, I have check the bios and jumpers and everything seems correct. I am going to replace the IDE cable incase it is not an ATA100 cable (my only guess so far) but I just can't seem to figure it out, system specs -

Atholan XP 1600+ TB at 1800+
256 megs generic PC133
Maxtor 5400rpm ATA100 40 gig HD
Geforce4 TI4200 Special edition 128 meg
SB live! value
2 generic lan cards

I ran though all the settings I could think of, DMA is on at UltraDMA mode 5. Everything looks good in the bios. I guess I will try resetting to all default and running the benchmark agian. Something is def. off. I also have copy and pasted my Sisoft results. Hopefully someone can help me and give me some ideas.

SiSoftware Sandra

Test Status
SMP Test : No
Total Test Threads : 1
SMT Test : No
Dynamic MP/MT Load Balance : No
Processor Affinity : No
Windows Disk Cache Used : Yes
Use Overlapped I/O : Yes
IO Queue Depth : 8 request(s)
Test File Size : 255MB
File Server Optimised : No

Benchmark Breakdown
Buffered Read : 54 MB/s
Sequential Read : 5 MB/s
Random Read : 3610 kB/s
Buffered Write : 30 MB/s
Sequential Write : 6 MB/s
Random Write : 4001 kB/s
Average Access Time : 6 ms (estimated)

Drive
Drive Type : Hard Disk
Total Size : 37.3GB
Free Space : 7.9GB, 21%

Performance Tips
Notice 5008 : To change benchmarks, click Options.
Notice 5004 : Synthetic benchmark. May not tally with 'real-life' performance.
Notice 5006 : Only compare the results with ones obtained using the same version!
Tip 5203 : Bypass cache to measure controller/disk performance.
Tip 2 : Double-click tip or press Enter while a tip is selected for more information about the tip.

Right now in comparrison it is slower then an ATA33 4.2k rpm 6.4 gb hard disk. I just can't find the problem.

i feel your pain, as my computer benchmarks poorly on every single sandra test i do.

defrag lately?
also make sure youve got the ata 100 cable it has more thiner wires in it...

yep, I have defraged several times with winXP built in software (going to try using sisofts next) I replaced the cable this morning and there appeared to be no change. Iv tried updating to the latest ata100 promise bios but it causes blue screens when I attempt to boot winXP with a technical stop.

Get Diskeeper to degrag your drive. Its 10x better than microshits. It speeds up my drive.

i don't know much about athlons, what is TB? are you OCing your processor?

tb likely = thunderbird

Throughbred, Its is .18 micro, It is actually a TB 1800xp overclocked to 2000xp (1700 mhz) I belive there is also a diffrence is cache size. I will get diskeeper and try it out tomorrow.

i think you should run some benchmarks at stock speed

how do you have your drives set up?

do you have your hd and cd/cdr or what ever on different channels?

cause i remember when my buddy decided to mix his hd's and cd like this:

primary master: primary hdd
primary slave: cd

secondary master: storage hdd
secondary slave: cdr

his hd's slowed down to about ata33 speeds....