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Poor HD performance

T

ThreeDollarBill

Member
I used Sandra 2002 to test the performance of my ATA 66 hard drive. I got a drive index of 6000. One of Sandra's reference drives which is very similar to mine got a drive index of 17000. :Q

The drive is recognized and enabled by the BIOS as UDMA 4. Windows 2000 says my drive is using Ultra DMA but it doesn't say which mode.

Could this discrepancy in performance be due to fragmentation? If so, what's a good defrag program? I tried using the windows defragmenter but when I analyze my drive after the defragmentation, it still shows up just as fragmented as before.

Perhaps there's a VIA tweak I'm missing?

Thanks.
 
That Sandra hard drive benchmark is uselessly unreliable. I get different scores depending on which of the connectors on the IDE cable I connect it to, different numbers in master and slave mode, and even different numbers between boots. And these aren't trivial differences either...I'm talking THOUSANDS of points. It's gotten to the point now where I don't even use it anymore. I just rely on HDTach 2.61...the results are believable, consistent, and easily reproducible.

BTW, Diskeeper (from Executive Software) is easily the best defragging program out there. I've gotten into the habit of defragging every day, and because I do that, each defrag takes about 3-5 minutes for a 40GB drive and the computer always runs smoothly.
 
The Window's 'defrag' should work nicely. Maybe it's just staying in good shape, and that's why it seems the same the next time around. As for Sandra........grrr. I hate that app. It says RAID 0 with two 7200's is slower than ATA-66. 😛

Sandra = deception
 
I posted in three forums and all three say that Sandra is unreliable....so I learned something today! 😀

I downloaded HDTach 2.52 and here are the results I got for my drive:

Random access time: 14.1ms
Average read speed: 20000KBps

which seem to agree with the drive's specs.

I'm also gonna give Diskeeper a try.

Thanks!
 
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