hd performance question..

[smmorrison]

ok, My system amd 1.4, ecs k7s5a mobo, 512 mb ddr 2100 ram.
I have two hard drives on my primary IDE channel a 40 gig quantum 7200rpm(ata100 capable) - primary system disk - master, and a 40 gig maxtor 5400 rpm drive - storage disk -slave. (Both drives are NTFS)

I ran SANDRA recently, and found that my primary drive is running rather slow around 15070kb/s, I ran SANDRA on my second drive, the 5400, and it came up as 17505kb/s.
My questions...
1) The first drive stated as running at ata100 in the bios startup, but the performance is well below ata100 benchmarks....what gives?(note, the performance was at this level prior to adding the second HD)

2) Why would the second(5400rpm) drive have faster benchmarks than the first(7200rpm)?

3) what are some good ways to optimize HD performance.

Thanks in advance, sorry if asking questions that have been answered recently.

 

[jdogg707]

Well, first of all, the drives are sharing a single IDE channel, and that cuts down on the amount of available bandwidth greatly. Most likely all the benches of HD's are performed on a drive with its own IDE channel. Secondly, the second drive may have a slower rotation speed, but if all the files for example are on the master disk, the slave is going to have more bandwidth and therefore be faster. I would try giving the first drive it's own channel iif possible and hook the second drive up to IDE2, you will see much better performance. Another thing you might want to try is making sure all chipset drivers are current....either Intel or AMD. If you have Intel, you might want to look into the Intel Application Accelerator, a free download from their website that can greatly increase performance.

 

[smmorrison]

thanks for the response. DO you know if it is possible to run ata100 with an ecs k7s5a and if so how?
thanks,