Western digital hard drive problem

[steve154]

I just installed my new Western Digital 80Gb, 8Mb cache drive. I am running Win XP pro and made the drive a single partition-NTFS. It is obviously a fresh install of Win XP. I have no programs installed yet other than Sandra and performance test. The only drivers I installed were for my scanner and video card-Radeon DDR 32Mb.

The problem is that the drive is running slow, as shown by Sandra and performance test. It is about half the speed of my 40Gb Maxtor Diamond Max +60. I was looking for a big performance gain with this new drive. Is the NTFS file system slower than FAT32? Do I need to intall other drivers for my motherboard? (Epox 8K7A-AMD 761 chipset). Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[jbritt1234]

Access on NTSF is theoretically faster on NTFS than FAT32. But, it most situations it will not be anything noticeable. Is it a 7200 rpm drive?

You should go to the Epoc website and download and install any drivers they have for your mobo. This may help...

 

[steve154]

The drive is 7200 rpm and is supposed to be the fastest IDE drive there is. I was under the impression that I didn't need to install any drivers for this chipset in Win XP. Can anyone tell which ones I should install? Part of the chipset is AMD(North) and part is VIA(south).

Thanks!

 

[jbritt1234]

I never believe that windows will do what Bill says it will.

I would try the drivers from Epoc. In XP you can always roll them back through device Mgr.

 

[bighurtx82]

Is DMA enabled on the hard drive? If not, that could be the reason for the decreased performance.

 

[stevewm]

The problem is not your drive, its Sandra's hardrive benchmark.

The hardrive benchmark in Sandra is known to be very inaccurate. Espcially when used on the NT5 platform (Win2k/XP).

I suggest using a real hardrive benchmarking program like HDTach or ATTO, both of which you can find the links to easily by searching for them on Google.