Slow Hard Drive on Aladdin V - would a Promise Card Help?

[tweakr]

Hi Guys

I just put together a new K6-2 550 System for the family to use at home (dirt cheap). Anyway, I'm concerned about the speed of the Hard Disk - it's a Fujitsu MPE3136AT. Under Sandra it shows up as ~4000, which is a third of what the IBM 13.5gb 22GXP gets on my machine - Celeron 550 on a ZX Chipset motherboard. This is with all the ALI Drivers installed, at UDMA66 with DMA enabled. Should I splash out on a Promise card for the machine to impove the HD performance, assuming it's the motherboard chipset that's slow - or is it just the drive (it was cheap too...but it's big and reliable).

all comments appreciated
cheers
tweakr

 

[Peter]

It might well be the drive that is being slow. I've seen a lot better from ALi chipsets - especially with the latest revision 1543C south bridge chip which you seem to have (else you wouldn't have UDMA66). Why not attach the drive to your Celeron machine's second IDE channel just to benchmark it and find out?

But first have a look into the K6-2 system's BIOS and see if the IDE performance features (buffers, UDMA, etc.) are enabled.

Regards, Peter

 

[tweakr]

Hi Peter

Thanks for the reply.

I needed to do a reinstall of the OS and some hardware tidying anyway, so i did as u suggested and benchmarked the drive on my main machine. It got only ~500 points more on the ZX motherboard than the ALI - seems like the hard disk is just plain slow.

Thanks anyway
tweakr

 

[Peter]

Yep, the extra few hundreds on your Celeron system come from the latter's overclocking - at the 104 or 105 MHz you're running at now, your IDE controllers also run 4 or 5 percent above specified speed.

Regards, Peter