Slow IDE transfer speeds [Updated w/20gig hdd benchmarks] [Update #2: 20gig hdd BROKEN! :(]

[Yzzim]

I just reinstalled Windows and everything seems to be working great (as opposed to how it was here). One thing I have noticed though is that my IDE transfer speeds are EXTREMELY slow. They have not improved at all over the previous thread. In case you haven't looked at the old thread I'll post them here:

I ran some "benchmarks" on the hard drives. I transfered some mp3s from the primary hard drive to my storage drive. Here's what I got:

50 secs for 61.2mb = 1.224mb/sec


75 secs for 69.4mb = .93mb/sec


238 secs for 84.8mb = .35mb/sec

As I said, the speeds have not improved at all. Both hard drives are set to DMA. The primary is set at Ultra DMA Mode 5, and the secondary drive is set at Ultra DMA Mode 2

Both hard drives are on seperate IDE Channels.


First off, what's the difference between Mode 2 and Mode 5?

Secondly, what are some good IDE benchmarking programs?

And finally, what can I do to fix these slow speeds? I've noticed the CD-ROM has a slow transfer speed as well, so it's not just the hard drives.

Here's my system specs:

Athlon XP1600+
Abit KR7A-133
2x256mb Crucial PC2100
Maxtor 20gb 7200rpm hdd (Primary)
Maxtor 40gb 5400rpm hdd (Storage)
Radeon 64MB DDR
Promise Ultra 66 ATA IDE card
Linksys 10/100 NIC
Maxtor 4-port USB 2.0 card

Updated: Benchmarks about 8-9 messages down

 

[mechBgon]

UDMA 5 would be ATA100 (100Mb/sec peak) and I believe UDMA 2 would be ATA33 (33Mb/sec peak). Yeah, no wonder you're not pleased if it's going that slow :Q

I think if it were me, I'd put both HDD's on one channel where they can share a fast protocol (ATA100 or higher) and put the optical drive on its own cable where it can do what it wants without bogging down the HDD's. Maybe you've tried that already, though?

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
UDMA 5 would be ATA100 (100Mb/sec peak) and I believe UDMA 2 would be ATA33 (33Mb/sec peak). Yeah, no wonder you're not pleased if it's going that slow :Q

I think if it were me, I'd put both HDD's on one channel where they can share a fast protocol (ATA100 or higher) and put the optical drive on its own cable where it can do what it wants without bogging down the HDD's. Maybe you've tried that already, though?

Right now i have both hard drives on a seperate channel.

I don't see how putting them on one channel would make them faster..?

I have the cds disconnected right now just to test out the hard drives.

 

[Pariah]

Are you sure the drive isn't just broken? Have you tried it in another system? Before running through all sorts of diagnostics I would test the drive to see how slow it really is. Go here and download Winbench:

winbench

You don't need the one with the graphics, just the 10MB version is fine.

Just run the STR and access time benchmarks for both drives and post your results here. I don't think this will fix the problem, but I always recommend using MS's ATA drivers as opposed to the VIA ones.

 

[chizow]

Sounds like you got that 2nd drive on a 40 conductor ribbon. Double-check to make sure as your drive will default to UDMA-2 if its a 40 conductor ribbon.

Chiz

Edit: What's connected to the Promise IDE card? Are you connecting the HDD's using the mobo headers?

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Are you sure the drive isn't just broken? Have you tried it in another system? Before running through all sorts of diagnostics I would test the drive to see how slow it really is. Go here and download Winbench:

winbench

You don't need the one with the graphics, just the 10MB version is fine.

Just run the STR and access time benchmarks for both drives and post your results here. I don't think this will fix the problem, but I always recommend using MS's ATA drivers as opposed to the VIA ones.

I'm downloading the program now, thanks.

What do you mean MS's ATA drivers? I let Windows XP install all the drivers it has needed so far. Was going to update the 4-in-1s in a little bit.

not sure if I'm using MS's drivers or not, I doubt it tho.

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: chizow
Sounds like you got that 2nd drive on a 40 conductor ribbon. Double-check to make sure as your drive will default to UDMA-2 if its a 40 conductor ribbon.

Chiz

Both drives are on a ATA66 or 100 or whatever ribbon.

I've got the optical drives on the cheaper ribbons

Edit:

Edit: What's connected to the Promise IDE card? Are you connecting the HDD's using the mobo headers?

Nothing is on the Promise IDE card currently. Both optical drives are disconnected. The hdds are on the motherboard IDE header.

 

[chizow]

Well, I was having poor performance on my RAID 0 array on a 3ware Escalade hardware RAID controller. E-mailed tech support and they told me upgrade my "basic" drives to dynamic drives. Worked like a charm. I was getting read/write speads slower than a single IDE drive; after upgrading I was seeing anywhere from 600% to 1000% performance increases, particularly with smaller block sizes.

If its something you might want to try, I can dig up the link I posted instructions in.

Chiz

 

[Pariah]

So long as the ATA drives are on the primary ATA MB channels, changing the drives to dynamic disks will do nothing. Only addin cards are treated like SCSI devices, and possibly third party onboard RAID/ATA133 controllers.

 

[Yzzim]

Ok, just got done with the WinBench results. Took me about 2 hours to complete them. I tried running the Disk Transfer Rate but it took literally a half hour just to complete probably 1/8 of the test.

Anyway, here's the results for my Primary 20 gig hard drive:

WEIGHTED SUITE SCORE UNITS

Business Disk WinMark 99 602 [1] Thousand Bytes/Sec
High-End Disk WinMark 99 1730 [1] Thousand Bytes/Sec

TEST SCORE UNITS

Disk Access Time 23.8 [1] Milliseconds
Disk CPU Utilization 74.1 [1,2] Percent Used
Disk Playback/Bus [1,3]
Overall 602 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE [1,3]
Overall 1730 Thousand Bytes/Sec
AVS/Express 3.4 1120 Thousand Bytes/Sec
FrontPage 98 25300 Thousand Bytes/Sec
MicroStation SE 1210 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Photoshop 4.0 1060 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Premiere 4.2 1300 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Sound Forge 4.0 3700 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Visual C++ 5.0 3500 Thousand Bytes/Sec

Legend: Best Score, Intermediate Score, Worst Score, Training Run, Variances > 3%

NOTES

[1] Common test settings: Disk Drive=c:\ Report CPU Utilization=No
[2] The transfer rate during this test averaged 292 thousand bytes per second.
[3] The playback directory was c:\~wbdtmp

I'll work on the 40gig drive tomorrow since I don't have another 2 hours to do these benchmarks.

Hope this explains something.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: Pariah
So long as the ATA drives are on the primary ATA MB channels, changing the drives to dynamic disks will do nothing. Only addin cards are treated like SCSI devices, and possibly third party onboard RAID/ATA133 controllers.

Hmm yah thats what I figured, I've never had to mess with dynamic drives prior to my hardware raid card, and have always gotten good performance from my IDE drives.

A few more suggestions, have you checked what the drives are jumpered to? I think a few makes are partial to how they are jumpered. Also, is there any kind of throttling option for the drives? Not sure what drives you are running, but my Maxtor's have throttling.

Dunno, those scores seem low.

Chiz

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: chizow

Originally posted by: Pariah
So long as the ATA drives are on the primary ATA MB channels, changing the drives to dynamic disks will do nothing. Only addin cards are treated like SCSI devices, and possibly third party onboard RAID/ATA133 controllers.

Hmm yah thats what I figured, I've never had to mess with dynamic drives prior to my hardware raid card, and have always gotten good performance from my IDE drives.

A few more suggestions, have you checked what the drives are jumpered to? I think a few makes are partial to how they are jumpered. Also, is there any kind of throttling option for the drives? Not sure what drives you are running, but my Maxtor's have throttling.

Dunno, those scores seem low.

Chiz

Jumpers are set correctly

care to explain throttling? I've never heard of it before.

 

[Yzzim]

I just restarted my system for the first time after the install and it's slower then sh#t. man this is pissing me off.

I'm going to install XP on one of my other drives and see if that helps.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: Yzzim
Ok, just got done with the WinBench results. Took me about 2 hours to complete them. I tried running the Disk Transfer Rate but it took literally a half hour just to complete probably 1/8 of the test.

Disk Access Time 23.8 [1] Milliseconds
Disk CPU Utilization 74.1 [1,2] Percent Used

There is definitely something wrong there. I don't even know what drive that is, but I can tell you those numbers are way off. Most peculiar is the CPU utilization. If you're anywhere above 7 or 8% there is something wrong, current drives are usually under 1%, so you are anywhere from 10x over to 80x more than should be expected in that test. Try changing your ATA driver to the standard dual channel PCI IDE driver and see if anything changes. There is a way in winbench to just run selected tests so you don't have to go through all those tests again. Just run CPU utilization and access time. You access time result looks like something straight out of the 80's. Is that drive a USB drive? I saw you mention one in your other thread. I would recommend moving that drive to another system and see if it performs just as poorly.

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: Pariah

Originally posted by: Yzzim
Ok, just got done with the WinBench results. Took me about 2 hours to complete them. I tried running the Disk Transfer Rate but it took literally a half hour just to complete probably 1/8 of the test.

Disk Access Time 23.8 [1] Milliseconds
Disk CPU Utilization 74.1 [1,2] Percent Used

There is definitely something wrong there. I don't even know what drive that is, but I can tell you those numbers are way off. Most peculiar is the CPU utilization. If you're anywhere above 7 or 8% there is something wrong, current drives are usually under 1%, so you are anywhere from 10x over to 80x more than should be expected in that test. Try changing your ATA driver to the standard dual channel PCI IDE driver and see if anything changes. There is a way in winbench to just run selected tests so you don't have to go through all those tests again. Just run CPU utilization and access time. You access time result looks like something straight out of the 80's. Is that drive a USB drive? I saw you mention one in your other thread. I would recommend moving that drive to another system and see if it performs just as poorly.

That's the primary hard drive on the IDE channel. It's what I run windows off of.

How would I change my ATA driver to the standard dual channel PCI IDE driver? I've never done it before so I have no idea.

Thanks for the help, btw

 

[chizow]

click on my computer/control panel, hardware management, device mangler, then choose the twisty for hard disk/ide controllers. Choose your current controller and right click on it to properties, then choose update driver. When it asks you choose do not search and you will designate. On the next screen choose display a list of known drivers. Then choose the dual-channel IDE driver and install it.

Chiz

 

[NokiaDude]

Can a Windows 98 computer access a NTFS Dynamic Disk over a network?

 

[Pariah]

yes

 

[NokiaDude]

Can someone link me up with a site that list the advantages and disadvantages of basic/dynamic disks?

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: chizow
click on my computer/control panel, hardware management, device mangler, then choose the twisty for hard disk/ide controllers. Choose your current controller and right click on it to properties, then choose update driver. When it asks you choose do not search and you will designate. On the next screen choose display a list of known drivers. Then choose the dual-channel IDE driver and install it.

Chiz

Ok, put them on the "standard" driver and Windows is still slower then ever. The IDE transfer rates are just horried.

I'm gonna test my storage drive (40 gig 5400rpm) drive now.

 

[Pariah]

Can someone link me up with a site that list the advantages and disadvantages of basic/dynamic disks?

Basic Storage Versus Dynamic Storage in Windows XP

 

[Yzzim]

For all those still reading this thread (though I don't think it's many ) I just installed WindowsXP on my 40gig (5400rpm) drive and it's working awesome!

I've restarted about 5 times and I'm just amazed at the speed. Everything seems SO much faster, I love it!

So, that means that my Maxtor 20gig hdd is "broken". Any idea what's wrong with it? How can I get it RMA'd? The warranty is good until Oct 2003. I can still put it in my system and everything, the access time is just really slow.

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[Pariah]

Go to Maxtor's website. They have an online RMA service.