Hard drive - only 10mb / sec read - FIXED

[warbean]

Hello,

Today I decided to run HD Tach for the first time testing my two WD 74GB Raptors which I've owned for about 2 years with no real problems. Diagnostics on the drive show them to be healthy. They are in a non RAID config.

Imagine my immense surprise when both drives only showed average read speeds of around 9mb/ sec, FAR BELOW the average of around 70-90 for this drive. What the heck is going on? Repeat tests confirmed this, as well as the Windows XP drive speed test utility.

The drives are connected through SATA with all jumpers set to default. DMA is enabled, if that matters. The strange thing is, I don't notice anything unusually slow about the drives; games and such install relatively quickly. Of course as I've said I've had these drives for two years so it is very possible I have no idea what "nomal" for these drives are- could they be a lot faster maybe?

Anyone know what settings in BIOS or windows or hardware could be causing such slowdown?

Rest of my system:

A64 3800+ Venice OC stable to 2.58
2GB Corsair RAM
MSI k8N Neo 4 Plat (nforce 4)
7900gt
sb audigy
XP SP 2 all updates and fixes

Anyone help AT ALL would be GREATLY APPRECIATED.

Thanks,
Warren

EDIT: FIXED. Uninstalld Nvidia IDE-SW driver that comes with nforce 4 chipset drivers, reverted to standard windows ide driver. read speed now 65mb/s, gonna check for stability.

what a fvcking joke, how can Nvidia release trash like this that cripples a system? anyone else seen such slowdown using that driver?

 

[warbean]

Ok I just confirmed the test was roughly accurate....moving a 90mb file from one drive to the other took roughly 9 seconds.

My friend could do it in 2. How long have I been paying for this extra performance and not getting it?

-W

 

[LW07]

Your friend's drive probably is a newer version or something. Because today, there are 74GB raptors with 16mb of cache out there.

 

[smthmlk]

my raptor (74GB/8MB) is able to feed 40-60MB/sec (sustained) to transfer large files (dvd images) across my gigabit lan (via NFS in linux). There is something very wrong with your setup.

Do you have the nforce drivers installed for your motherboard? If so, give us some details about them.

 

[warbean]

Yikes, what is going on?

I have

MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum, latest BIOS. (Nov 2005)
Nforce 4 Chipset latest AMD (6.86), includijng Nividia IDE Storage driver

smthmlk, I'd appreciate a PM if you could think of anything I'm missing.

Thanks,
Warren

 

[smthmlk]

try removing the nvidia ide storage driver and the use microsoft one.

edit: haha just saw that you edited your original post and that this fixed it. congrats.

 

[Lord Evermore]

There have always been mixed results with the Nvidia SW-IDE drivers, in every version of their chipsets. It really is strange that they can't build a consistently high-performing driver that can compete with the basic IDE driver that Microsoft put out essentially over 5 years ago.