I did search around the web a bit, but couldn’t get a answer that really made sense to me. I’m hoping a guru or two here can help out.
Rather than buy a new computer, I purchased some new parts and reused some old parts to put together new machine. After a bit of early head-shaking and cursing, I got things to work, and I’m fairly proud of my creation. Other then opting for RDRAM, it has better spec’s than a comparable Dell system, and came in at about 1/3 the cost.
Just out of curiosity, I downloaded the latest set of Sandra tools from SciSoft. I ran a few benchmarks against similarly equipped systems, and was expecting to be pleased with the comparison. The memory bandwidth [512MB of PC2700, with a M. board bus that is supposed to be 533Mhz] was off the charts, but the memory performance itself lagged noticeably behind the included baselines for PC2700. This is strange, but it wasn’t the biggest unpleasant surprise. My ATA133 hard drive with 8MB onboard cache (NTFS file system, UDMA 6) performs about as well as an ATA66 with a 2MB cache. I’m inconsolable. To be clear, however, I haven’t noticed problems with the drive outside of this testing.
Any ideas? Flawed test? Did I screw up the installation? The bios (Award v6) autodetected the drive correctly, but I believe I did have to manually turn on LBA support. As per their instructions, I allowed XP to partition and format and did not use Maxtor’s formatting tools, dynamic overlays, etc.
For a drive over 32GB on XP, the documentation states that NTFS is the only option. It was also the only choice during formating.
Thanks for the test link, I’ll give it a try.
Is there any possibility a drive could otherwise work fine, but have a problem so severe it runs about 1/2 it’s expected read/write speed (at least according to Sandra)?
I’ve got a 80 gig and 40 gig HD both formatted Fat32 using XP (80) and Win2k(40).
My guess about your low scoring HD is…I have no guesses. Whats the number you are getting? I got a 404 initially after all Microsoft updates were done. I got new 4in1 drivers (ver 4.45) and it jumped to 477. It stayed around 480 with some very minor O/Cing. Then I got DirectX 9.0 and all my scores went to crap. Then I got the newest Nvidia drivers (41.09) and my HD scores jumped up to 581. Last test they came up as 545. I’d say the 4in1’s were the biggest jump but they tend to jump around a bit on their own.
Have you checked that DMA is enabled for the hard disk in the Device Mangler? I’ve thus far avoided XP as much as possible, so I’m not an expert user. I imagine that Device Mangler still exists in some dark corner of the OS. Check the entry for the hard disk itself and make sure DMA is checked. Also be certain that any 4-in-1 type drivers for motherboard components are installed. I usually install these right after the OS finishes installing. What make/model is the mobo?
Dead0man, I believe the 4in1 drivers are for VIA chipsets, but I thought you might be on to something there, so I visited the SiS site (I have the 645DX chipset) and got the latest driver package. I confirmed that both the IDE controller and the drive have new SiS drivers, but the speed problem remains. The numbers I’m getting look like this (reported in MB/sec.):
The_Raven, I checked again after installing the new drivers, and DMA is still enabled. The motherboard itself is an Aopen AX45-533N. I’d gladly have paid an extra US$20 or so for an Intel chipset, but I was sold on ATA133 capability. I’m not sure it is a board problem anyway. The chipset, as I mentioned above, is SiS 645DX.