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Poor hdd performance

K

kaborka

Senior member
I'm building a machine for my sister and put in a Maxtor 27GB ATA-66 drive I had from an old system. In the old system it had been attached with a 40-wire IDE cable, so it was running at plain IDE speeds of 33MHz (UDMA 2). In the new box, it's attached to an 80-wire cable, and it's reporting UDMA 4 in Device Mananger. The disk seemed very slow, so I checked it with IOMeter. It's only getting 20 MB/s read performance, measured by IOMeter's 16K block read-only test. By contrast, a Maxtor ATA-100 drive is achieving 55 MB/s in UDMA Mode 5 in the same test. I think the old drive should be doing better than it is. It got a clean bill of health from the PowerMax test utility.

I remember hearing that some faster drives attached to a 40-wire cable will downgrade to UDMA 2, but will not automatically return to their faster rates when put on an 80-wire cable without the use of a mode-switching utility. The only thing I've been able to find by search has been a reference to a Maxtor UDMAUPDT.exe utility. However, I can find nothing about this at maxtor.com.

Anyone familiar with this issue?
 
You didn't give your OS. Win2k needs SP2.
I was hunting around a similar problem. Take a look here :
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/99609816/m/1220990645

Win2k/XP might have a problem of not running UDMA even if DMA is enabled.
Don't mess around with your registry, just inspect to see if its pio. In my case, I removed the secondary IDE channel in device manager and let windows detect it upon a restart. Then it was detected as UDMA and everything was just fine.

Also I heard WinXp might silently degrade UDMA even down to PIO mode if too many errors are being detected.
 
No suprise there. Interface rates don't make for good actual throughput. And yes, even though it got better lately, IDE drives are surprisingly slow.

From a drive that's a couple of years old, 20 MB/s is actually quite normal.
 
Sorry, shoud've mentioned it's WinXP SP2. In the discussions I found by search, such as those cited above, the Device Mgr was reporting PIO even tho the drive supported UDMA. In my case, the DevMgr is showing UDMA Mode 4 for the drive, but it's getting what I thought was a poor xfr frate. Maybe Peter is right. The drive is from 1999, and tho it's 7200rpm maybe 20 MB/s is the best it will do. I was hoping to find out more about that mode-lock issue I recall hearing about, and possible Maxtor utils to fix it. I suppose if the drive was in fact locked at ATA33 it would show UDMA Mode 2 in DM and not Mode 4.

If I find anything new I'll update the thread.
 
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