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Hard Drive Benchmarks WAY Low

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UTmtnbiker

Diamond Member
Just decided to benchmark my drive for the heck of it...I figured, I'm benchmarking everything else so that when I change it, at least I have a reference point to see how it was and how it is.

Well...depressing and I'm now wondering if there's something wrong with my scores.

Running an AMP XP 2000+ on an ECS K7S5A Pro board with the SiS735 chipset. Running Win XP Pro w/ 256 MB RAM. Have a Promise ATA100 PCI card and a 80GB Maxtor 7200 RPM drive (the liquid bearing one) with rounded cables and as the only device and formated for NTFS.

I've tried the benchmark on both the PCI card and using the mainboard's Primary IDE channel. With both, running SiSoft Sandra Filesystem Benchmark v2002.6.8.97, I'm getting scores around 15000-18000. Compared to their marks, I'm about 10000 too slow.

As far as drivers go, I'm running the Microsoft IDE channel drivers. I tried the SiS IDE drivers, but they SUCK! Dropped my scores even lower down to about 12000.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.
 
If it were me, I'd upgrade the disk to Dynamic Disk in Windows Drive Management and see if that helps.
 
Thanks for the tip. More info though please. 🙂

I've never used this program before (didn't even know it exisited until you mentioned it).

I've got the program up...how do I "upgrade" the disk to use dynamic disk management?

TIA.
 
Right-click the drive's icon where it says "Disk 0 - Basic" or such, and it should pop up a menu that has the option. BTW, you should make sure to kill off all running programs first as a prudent measure 😀
 
Thanks...did that and cleared out some more SiS IDE drivers (some are still being used once you install and remove them). NEVER USE SiS IDE drivers. Found that little nuggets of info on another board. Wish I would've known that sooner. Had to do some surgery on the registry...lucky I'm still here! 🙂

I don't know which one did it, but my scores went up to 22000. Still lower than the 28000 that Sandra says is normal for a ATA100 80GB drive running WinXP & NTFS. But slowly it's getting up there.
 
Originally posted by: Intelman07
Is dynamic disk good for everyday use? Should we all do it?
Click to expand...
It's got some benefits (ability to dynamically resize, create, and delete volumes, although I haven't experimented with this aspect) but some drawbacks too (can't dual-boot with Win98, not sure what happens with Linux).

 
Looks like I'm having a similar problem. I'm only getting 19492 KB/s as my File System Benchmark score in Sandra. This is benchmarking a Western Digital 80 GB 8 MB Cache hard drive (WD800JB). Really weird.

Running Windows XP Pro, Intel Application Accelerator. System is an Intel P4 2.4B, with built-in ATA 100 controller (Dell Dimension 8250 system).

There is a Maxtor 30 GB ATA 133 drive attached to it as a slave, (didn't benchmark that drive though).

Any ideas if this is a really low number, and how I can increase performance?
 
Make sure that you have the latest BIOS and chipset drivers for your system and check that DMA is enabled on all of the drives and channels.
 
Bios and chipset should be updated (I installed the drivers that came with the Dell).

Did a full defrag.

Installed Intel Application Accelerator, drives are at UDMA 5.

Still getting similar/slightly lower Sandra Soft scores 🙁
 
Sandra is a terrible benchmark and won't tell you anything about the performance of your storage system. Use something else like HDTach, ATTO, or the lowlevel tests in winbench.
 
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