uber noob HD question

[oupei]

I've never realized cared much for HD performance myself so I don't know didley squat about them but today I've been doing some transferring of files from my old computer to my new one and I realized that my HD write speed is pretty much limited to about 2 or 3 MB/s. I thought these things were supposed to be fast, like enough to warrant at least ATA30. is there something wrong? it's a maxtor 7200rpm 2mb cache 20gig HD btw. i'm running win98SE and i've got default IDE drivers. i just found out the DMA option for CD-ROM's like last week, so i guess i'm hoping for an HD equivalent. is there something i'm missing or are HD's just hella slow?

 

[LED]

Dunno your MoBo but check for new IDE Drivers from the Chipset, Look @ System Properties and make sure that Ultra DMA is enabled and check in the BIOS/CMOS as well...Lastly make sure you are using ATA100 IDE cables for the devices.

 

[zephyrprime]

Tranfers are quite slow in windows if you're copying lots of small files or if your drive is super fragmented.

How are you transferring the files? Are both drives in the same computer or are you using a newtork?

And be sure you've got that DMA enabled. Otherwise, you'l be stuck with PIO 4 which tops out at 16MB/s

 

[oupei]

yup it was the DMA. I looked at my IDE controllers but overlooked my harddrive. btw, are there any good HD benchmarking utilities?

i have EPOX 8RDA+ btw and was transferring ~600mb movie over ethernet.

 

[shootinyou]

Originally posted by: oupei
yup it was the DMA. I looked at my IDE controllers but overlooked my harddrive. btw, are there any good HD benchmarking utilities?

i have EPOX 8RDA+ btw and was transferring ~600mb movie over ethernet.

Sandra

HD Tach

3DMark2000-2001-2003

Hope this helps

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: oupei
i have EPOX 8RDA+ btw and was transferring ~600mb movie over ethernet.

Ding ding ding... there's the majority of your problem. A 100-megabit Ethernet connection maxes at 12.5 megabytes per second. Throw some gigabit cards in the PCs and link them with a Cat5e crossover cable, and you'll be cookin' with gas

edit: also, you could go into your nVidia Ethernet driver properties and set it to Optomize For: Throughput instead of CPU.