Hard Drive Issues

[Positron]

I have two Maxtor D740X-6L 80 gig 2 meg cache hard drives. I was using Sisoft Sandra 2003 to bench them. One drive scored around 27000 which was what it should have but the other scored anywhere between 16000 and 20000. I used Maxtor's Powermax software to analyze the drive and it passed all tests. I then thought to use the Acoustic Management software to see if one drive was on a quiet setting. Both showed to be set on performance so I tried turning it acoustic management off all together. That didn't help so I set both back to performance. Now both drives are scoring about 18000-20000. I went to look to check my DMA settings in Windows XP and one drive is running in mode 5 while the other is running in mode 4. Does anyone know why two identical drives would be running in different DMA modes? I've tried reformatting to see if that would change it, but that didn't work.

Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[KenGr]

Probably this is a result of using SiSoft Sandra. This is generally considered to be an inconsistent benchmark for hard disks. I know I've seen a lot of variation. I use for quick checks but I don't really believe it shows reliable tuning information. It apparently is dependent on the data structure existing on the disk.

 

[Positron]

I have a feeling that its something else, but I could be wrong. I'll check here soon, but what programs are recommended to bench the hard drives that work under Windows XP?

 

[tjaisv]

Tom's Hardware Guide uses HD Tach 2.61 and PC Mark 2002 to bench hd performance