WD 120 GB 8 MB 7200 RPM, slow performance... why?

[joey2k]

Hi

Running the hard drive mentioned in the message title. It's fast but, according to SiSoft Sandra, not nearly as fast as it could be. Here are the numbers:

My drive: 19333
ATA100 5.4K 30GB: 20000
ATA100 7.2K 120GB: 31400

It appears my hard drive is running way too slow. Can anyone else comment on the scores they get with there WD 8 MB drives?

My system: Athlon XP 1700+ @ 133 FSB, 512 MB DDR333, Epox 8k3a.
Have Norton SystemWorks 2002 installed, and it has its speeddisk service running.

Hard drive is on it's own channel, about 50 GB used. Anyone have any suggestions... I'd love to get this drive as fast as it could be!

Thanks
-- Joel

 

[Kingofcomputer]

sandra is a joke, not a trustworthy benchmark.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

I agree that you shouldn't let a benchmark program worry you. My only suggestions are to (1) make sure you've got the proper UDMA settings in the device manager and (2) defragment the disk. Also, if the disk is 85% or more full, another disk or a bigger disk to offload files to would help.

 

[alobar]

Originally posted by: joey2k
Hi

Running the hard drive mentioned in the message title. It's fast but, according to SiSoft Sandra, not nearly as fast as it could be. Here are the numbers:

My drive: 19333
ATA100 5.4K 30GB: 20000
ATA100 7.2K 120GB: 31400

It appears my hard drive is running way too slow. Can anyone else comment on the scores they get with there WD 8 MB drives?

My system: Athlon XP 1700+ @ 133 FSB, 512 MB DDR333, Epox 8k3a.
Have Norton SystemWorks 2002 installed, and it has its speeddisk service running.

Hard drive is on it's own channel, about 50 GB used. Anyone have any suggestions... I'd love to get this drive as fast as it could be!

Thanks
-- Joel

i have the 80gb wd special edition and i get 28000 approx in sandra,
my setup is p4 2.4b@2700
512 mb c2 ddr400 mem
albatron 845pe mobo.

 

[joey2k]

alobar -> That's exactly what I was looking for. I'm thinking I might ghost my current OS and temporarly install a fresh OS install on the hard drive to see if my low scores are due to hardware or software.

I checked Device Manager and the drive's at DMA 5. Drive is less than 50% full.

How about PC Mark 2002? My HD score is 809.

Thanks
-- Joel

 

[OvErHeAtInG]

hi, I have the same drive and I get ~1000 in PC Mark. I wouldn't worry too much about that bench either. Did you install that "data lifeguard" stuff? I didn't experiment with it yet...

 

[joey2k]

No, I didn't install data lifeguard... I wonder if it has anything to do with SMART.

Thanks for posting benchmark. I'll try not to worry about it but I'm sure it will be in the back of my mind until I figure out the reason for the lower score 🙂.

Could it be because the test file used to do the benchmark was on one of the inside tracks of the hard drive instead of the outside tracks. As I understand HDs, the outside tracks provide faster data transfer, although slow data access (higher latency).

-- Joel