Poor Hard Disk performance. Why?

Diarmuid

Hi

My computer (Athlon XP 1700/ 765 RAM + 2 internal HDs) has started to act up recently. The computer crashed badly when I try to burn a DVD and the hard disk performance seems very poor. However I have no idea where to start debugging it. I have AVG and Adaware uptodate and when I run HDTune I get the following

HD Tune: ST3160023A Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 8.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 17.3 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 14.2 MB/sec
Access Time : 17.7 ms
Burst Rate : 14.9 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 82.4%


From looking on the web I would expect average rates of 40MB/sec here. Anyone want to point me in the right direction so I can start to understand why my computer is performing so poorly.

Thanks

Diarmuid

Civilian_Target

OK - right click My Computer-> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> Primary/Secondary IDE Channel -> Advanced Settings

Ensure that DMA is enabled.

If that fails, next trick is a Windows "Magic reboot"

Khannie

I got 103.3 burst and 59.1 average.

You in PIO mode?

Diarmuid

Thanks for the replies guys, I am running in DMA Mode 5 which I think is correct. I am going to install XP on a second partition and boot knoppix and do a few benchmarks with those. If the problem is still there then it's a hardware or BIOS issue, if not then it's time for a fresh XP install. Oh the pain.

BTW This all seems to have started recently, my computer crashed badly when trying to burn a dvd recently/ I had to reset the BIOS to get the computer to boot. The DVD is on the secondary IDE which seems too much of a concidence with the issues I am having with HD performance. God damn it, next computer is going to be OSX !!!

Stephen

Wonky IDE cable? I had a PC crashing repeatedly due to an IDE cable whose cladding was damaged in places, allowing some of the wires to touch and utterly screwing up the system.

Inspector Gadget

Ehm, all _Seagate_ drives use codes starting with "ST" (Western Digital drives use numbers starting with "WD", as far as I remember ). The one in question in a Barracuda 7200.7 plus 160GB PATA device with an 8MB cache.

Seagates of modern times aren't the fastest drives in the world, but they tend to be very quiet and reliable. However, it's virtually impossible to benchmark them (or any other drive) properly on a computer that has an OS running on it - there are tasks doing stuff to tie up the PCI bus and hard disk(s) themselves intermittently that will affect performance.

Just my 2c...
Gadget

Diarmuid

That's true, but the performace is woeful. I could understand a percentage drop in performance but not a multiple. It's a seagate because I wanted to keep my computer totally quiet. I don;t need cutting edge performace. However what I am getting is terrible performance

As for the IDE cable issue, I'm thinking that this might be the problem. I'll try a few changes tonight and see what I can come up with.

maidhc

I have always understood that having an optical drive and a HD on the same IDE cable is asking for trouble. If nothing I presume it will slow the HD down to the speed of the optical I/O. Mind you I dont claim to be an expert on this, but it's worth trying before ripping other things apart.

Khannie

That's my understanding too: HDD's on one ide cable, optical drives on the other....otherwise you suffer the consequences of a slow hdd. Not entirely sure why this happens (at a low level), but I've definitely got it knockin' around in my noggin for some time now.

Optikus

Yeah its true.. when two devices of different speed are connected to the same IDE channel, the overall speed of that channel is limited to the that of the slowest connected device.

ressem

Performance is about that of a 4 yr old laptop drive, but what is CPU load due only to test.

Have you similar results with the other internal drive, using hd tune?

Is that CPU load measured without anything else running? In task manager, does the CPU load drop to near 0 when the test stops? Or what apps are keeping the CPU busy.

Perhaps MS indexing service or AV is throwing a wobbler for example. Or are you running radio streams while benchmarking?

Mixed drives used to be an issue but I heard that it was sorted with later EIDE revisions/cabling.

Diarmuid

I removed all the ide cables and resat them last night, loaded the optimised BIOS settings and things seem to be better. I dont have the results but the average is now around 26MB/sec. That's more inline with what I would expect (it an ABIT KT7A motherboard)

I tried burning a CD and that worked ok so next test is a DVD RW (this was crashing the computer previously)

I think my whole computer could do with an upgrade to a cheap but newer motherboard and keep the rest. Might have a look online and see what's avaiolable\

I'll post the results of HDTune tonight

Thanks again for all the input !!

Inspector Gadget

Hmm... the KT7A is a bit of an antique - does that even support drives of greater than 137GB natively? (I have a board with the same chipset, of a similar vintage, that doesn't, though if you have the RAID version you might be able to do something with the HPT370A...)

Could it be a controller problem? Also, consider scanning your computer for viruses/adware/stuff-like-that, and if you're so worried about the specifc numbers you get when you're benchmarking it, disable the anti-virus and other programs that perform frequent disk operations first.

Hope this helps,
Gadget