SLOW seek times - ata100/7200rpm

[mee987]

The problem is simple: my hard drive runs slow as hell. I have run many benchmarks, and since the buffered read hits close to 80 MB/s I'm fairly certain it isnt an IDE bus issue.

SEEK TIMES are where the drive is crappy - Sisoft Sandra shows average seek times from 30-50 ms, and the more reliable HD tach shows average seek time of 21 ms. This drive is rated by maxtor to be 8.9ms average.

I know benchmarks aren't everything, but I'm not just complaining that I don't get good benchmark scores -- I went to the benchmarks BECAUSE I was noticing crappy performance, and they back up my original observations.

Important info:
Maxtor 30GB 7200RPM ATA100 (Diamondmax Plus 40)
EpoX 8KHA+
Athlon XP 1700+
256mb PC2100 DDR
running on WinXP (NTFS partition)

Questions I'll answer before they are asked:
yes, im using an ata/100 cable
yes, im using newest 4-in-1 drivers
yes, ive used many different versions of the 4-in-1's
yes, the drive is on a cable by itself
yes, DMA is enabled in bios and windows (using ata100)

I know I must have left some info out, just let me know. ANY help with this problem would be greatly appreciated. TIA

 

[KenAF]

That Maxtor 30Gb is a crappy performing drive.

The manufacturer's listed specifications don't mean much of anything, you have to go by real world performance tests, such as those conducted by Storagereview.com. Still, your real world seek time on the Maxtor should be closer to 18ms, as identified by HDtach. Your results are a little slower than they should be, but they're not off by much.

What is the cluster size on your NTFS partition? Small cluster sizes can really hurt seek performance as seen in Sandra and other benchmarks (512 = slow seeks, 4096 clusters = faster seeks). In the past, I've also have found that the 4-in-1's on XP hurt disk performance as found through Sandra and HDtach, although I haven't tried in recent versions of the VIA drivers. MS already has the highest performing VIA drivers built in, so there's really no point in installing anything else.

 

[AndyHui]

Perhaps you should check if you have Accoustic Management enabled.

If AM is enabled, the drive is slowed to reduce noise. Use the SETACM.EXE Utility to check what mode your drive is in.

Instructions for AMSET are found here.