Are my HDtach scores about right for my system? HELP

[xWeston]

I dont know what a normal score is....
My system specs are

Abit kt7a-raid, 1.33ghz (140x9.5)
512mb pc133 cas 2 crucial ram
tnt2ultra
sblive
linksys nic
wester digital 30GB 7200rpm ata100 drive

here are my scores. I tried it with and without the via latency patch by that george guy. 4.37 via 4in1, windowsXP, ntfs, windowsupdates are done.

BEFORE the latency patch

AFTER the latency patch

it's weird that it does not report my burst correctly in the after picture as it seems to go off the scale... everything else is marginally (not to matter) slower with the patch installed. I defragged my drive before doing this.

Are these scores about right for this harddrive/setup?

 

[RalfHutter]

Your average read speed seems a little low to me. My specs are:

EPoX 8K7A, 1.4 gig (133 x 10.5)
1Gb Crucial cas 2.5 RAM
IBM 20Gb 60GXP HDD
IBM 40Gb 60GXP Hdd
Maxtor 80Gb D740X HDD

-all ATA100 (except Maxtor is ATA133 but running at ATA100)

All my HDtach scores are very similar for all my drives, seek time 12.1 to 12.6ms, read burst around 67 to 70mbps, average read speed is 33-35mbps.

 

[xWeston]

Ya i thought they could possibly be a little bit low also... maybe my drive just isnt the best. It is running off of the highpoint controller with the newest highpoint drivers and bios... newest motherboard bios as well.

any advice?

 

[CAMS]

Hi

This is under WinXP no additional drivers. HDTach 2.61.

IBM75GXP 15gb burst off scale at 80mb/s average 28.6mb/s
Maxtor Viper 40gb burst off scale at 80mb/s average 34.5mb/s

Try it if possible by using the ATA100 controller not the HighPoint.

 

[Pariah]

Your harddrive looks to be stuck in ATA33. Make sure you have the proper IDE drivers installed, and that your drive is detected as ATA66 or whatever it should be in the BIOS.

 

[kreno]

Those scores are actually just about right on the dot man, I have a 20GB WD that gets about the same, it's in the same model series more than likely. 24MB/sec is about right for the x00BB series... I just picked up a Maxtor D740X drive and I'm really liking it... 36MB/sec

 

[xWeston]

<< Your harddrive looks to be stuck in ATA33. Make sure you have the proper IDE drivers installed, and that your drive is detected as ATA66 or whatever it should be in the BIOS. >>



wrong

 

[Pariah]

wrong what? If you look at the graph of your drive, there is clearly something holding it back through the first half of the drive. The graph should gradually drop all the way across, not be flat through more than half the drive then start dropping. Due to the speed it is maxed at, an ATA33 limit would be the likely cuplrit. That may not be the problem, but should be the first place you check.

"24MB/sec is about right for the x00BB series"

I don't think any of the 00BB series were ever that slow. 24MB/s is what 2 year old IDE drive would do. The current 1200BB hits 50MB/s, I believe the oldest in the series is the 400BB, and even that drive did in the 35MB/s range.

 

[WyteWatt]

Pariah how high does the WD1200JB hit? Its the one with the 8 MB cache. (They do have a 120 gig one now btw with a 8mb cache)

 

[Aruba]

Hummm, are those RAID benches? May be a little low, but I'm no expert.

Here are my HDT benches, using two IBM 30GB, RAID0 w/IWILL-SIDE100RAID

home.internetcds.com/~barbados/hdtach.jpg

Why the difference?

 

[CAMS]

Pariah

Burst wouldn't exceed 33mb/s if he was stuck in ata33. He is bursting over 66mb/s eg of the scale at 80/mb/s so he is in ata100 mode.

 

[Duvie]

Seems a little low to me as well...

I just ran my new WD 40gig 7200rpm drive:

I get average of 39000...my burst is pegged at the max 80mb/s shown in my version of hdtach...my seek time is 9.9ms and I have an average of 7percent cpu utilization...

I am running an ECS sis735 mobo with 1.4ghz tbird
ata100...hardrive is sharing with another harddrive on the channel...

Edit: my 45gig maxtor partitioned into 2 drives (full of progs, not defragged in awhile) on the primary slave to wd 40gig gets average 32000....burst is maxed at 80mb/s...seek is 12.1ms...and about 8 percent utilization.

This drive like yours is based on 15gig platters...You should be pretty comparable to this...

I see the latency patch help the burst speed...The limits of hdtach is what is holding it back from showing it. It probably get slike 85-95, which would be close to true ata100 specs. I guess we see that the via bug has a real effect....

 

[Pariah]

"Pariah how high does the WD1200JB hit? Its the one with the 8 MB cache"

Same as the regular version I would guess. Cache has no affect on STR. Assuming the 1200JB vs regular is like the 1000JB vs regular in which nothing but the amount of cache is different, all the low level benchmarks should be exactly the same.

"Burst wouldn't exceed 33mb/s if he was stuck in ata33. He is bursting over 66mb/s eg of the scale at 80/mb/s so he is in ata100 mode."

HDTach burst numbers are often inaccurate, so nothing should be drawn from them. I have often been able to produce results where the burst speed was lower than max sustained result, which is clearly a sign something is not right with the benchmark.

 

[xWeston]

Any advice on how to try and get a better read speed? I think this drive is just not as good

 

[xWeston]

bump

 

[sharkeeper]

Your scores are right on. WDxxBB drives (up to the 80GB model) didn't start off with a real high STR then decay down. This behaviour is perfectly normal. If you force the drive in DMA 4 mode, your burst rate will be in the high 50's. HD Tach needs to be revised for much higher burst rates, particularly with high end (Ultra 320 SCSI!) setups!

Cheers!

 

[Pariah]

Here is SR's graph for the WD400BB, which is the first in the series.

WD400BB STR

The graph doesn't decay early on as much as I thought it would, but it is quite clear weston's drive is about 7MB/s too slow though most of the drive.

SR = 33.6MB-23.5MB
Weston = 25MB-18MB

 

[imgod2u]

I have an Adaptec U160 SCSI with a 10k rpm IBM Ultrastar U160 drive and my scores don't seem to be that high at all. 55MB/sec burst, average 26MB/sec throughput, maximum 28MB/sec, minimum 18MB/sec. That doesn't seem too good, in the bootup screen it does report the drive as 160 and I'm pretty sure I have termination and everything correct. This is in XP with HDtach, what could be wrong?

 

[John]

Aruba, your scores are off. You need to check advanced size check and then run the test.

 

[Priit]

Hmm, I get over 30Mb/s sequential read with single IBM 60GXP copying files into /dev/null. RAID should be faster than that ???

 

[sharkeeper]

Looks like Advanced size check test to me. If not, it would only test the first 8.4 GB. Advanced size check is not necessary (or recommended) with WinNT.

Cheers!

 

[John]

<< Looks like Advanced size check test to me. If not, it would only test the first 8.4 GB. Advanced size check is not necessary (or recommended) with WinNT. >>



sharkeeper, did you look at aruba's link?

I see only the first 8GB out of a 60GB array being tested.

 

[sharkeeper]

<< sharkeeper, did you look at aruba's link?

I see only the first 8GB out of a 60GB array being tested. >>



Didn't see that one! Windows 9x needs the advanced size check box ticked! (Providing it doesn't crash the machine!)

Cheers!

 

[kreno]

<< Hummm, are those RAID benches? May be a little low, but I'm no expert.

Here are my HDT benches, using two IBM 30GB, RAID0 w/IWILL-SIDE100RAID

home.internetcds.com/~barbados/hdtach.jpg

Why the difference? >>



Quick question... HOW IN THE HELL ARE YOU GETTING ABOVE 60 - 70MB/SEC???

SCSI??

 

[sharkeeper]

Under the best conditions, striping two drives (called RAID 0) will double your sequential transfer rate. This is the reason for the high benchmarks.

Cheers!