benchmarking hard drive performance

[m1ke101]

I just benchmarked my 80gb WD SE drive (with the 8mb cache) with sandra, and I noticed that my scores were pretty low. According to sandra, my score was 24800kb/sec, which it said was comparable to a 30gb 7200rpm drive 2mb cache drive. Now I know that sandra probably isn't the definitive benchmark for this, but I think it should give me a good idea and I think something may be wrong. DMA is enabled for sure, and I do have the nforce drivers installed as well. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Did you install the nforce drivers directly from nvidia, or the drivers on the manufacturer's CD? The nvidia drivers give some people performance and compatibility issues with IDE.

You can also download HDTach to see what speeds it shows (although it won't run under XP without registration).

 

[m1ke101]

installed the drivers from the internet, 2.03 I believe

 

[XBoxLPU]

During the installation of the 2.03 drivers did you say yes to install SW IDE divers ?

Because I think it works best if you manual update the IDE drivers...

At least that is how I did it...

 

[m1ke101]

hmmm...I just ran the winbench99 benchmarks and I'm getting really low performance, I compared it to the performance of other drives, and it says its SLOWER than the 80gb d740x 7200rpm 2mb cache drive on all the benchmarks. In my device manager, it says my IDE controller is the nvidia nforce MCP2 IDE controller...anyone have any ideas?

 

[Lord Evermore]

As has been mentioned, installing the SW IDE drivers during the nforce2 driver install can result in poor performance. Change to the default drivers.