When are we going to have a breed of IDE drive/controller that won't bring a system screeching down to P200 levels?

[FishTankX]

It seems like whenever I engage in a harddrive intensive task (Yes, I have DMA enabled) the system screetches to a halt. Everything takes forever. Even opening and closing programs. I realize that I may not have 512MB of RAM, does that have a significant impact on harddrive performance? It seems like IDE, in every machine I come across, can instantly cripple a machine just by engaging something as simple as an install.

When is IDE gonna stop crippling systems?

 

[XBoxLPU]

move to SCSI

 

[vetteguy]

What is the overall speed of your system? What are the specs on your drive(s)? For a reasonably fast system that should not be happening.

 

[jm0ris0n]

hehe...scsi

 

[Ilmater]

Moving to SCSI was the best move I ever made. My only regret is that I don't have enough money to get rid of IDE altogether.

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
It seems like whenever I engage in a harddrive intensive task (Yes, I have DMA enabled) the system screetches to a halt. Everything takes forever. Even opening and closing programs. I realize that I may not have 512MB of RAM, does that have a significant impact on harddrive performance?

Yes that's a huge issue. I'm assuming you're running WinXP (2k isn't much better) but the default install easily eats through 110MB of RAM right off the boot. So if you have 256 total once you're in windows you have roughly half of that to work with. How open an IM, Virus Scanner, and another app and you've used your full 256 and started paging stuff to the HD (alot of stuff).

Also if your HDs and Opticals are on the same channel and the Opticals are running in PIO mode then your HD isn't using DMA.

Thorin

 

[Macro2]

firewire2

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: Macro2
firewire2

Huh?

Thorin

 

[Budman]

you need more ram,Got 1 gig here & windows is flying.

 

[EeyoreX]

While I am aware and admit that probably the most serious bottlenecks in most current computers is the IDE subsystem, I tend to think that with a relatively decent setup and a generally fast computer to start with, if your computer "screetches to a halt" when ever your hard drives are used heavily, that there is likely some other factor(s) to consider. Almost all of the current main-stream computers use IDE subsystems and are far from "screetching to halts" and are in fact putting out serious benchmark scores. Some of these use RAID of course, and that will be faster in many cases, but others that use single drive setups are no slouches at all. If you add RAM to at least a minimum of 512MB I think you'll notice a huge difference. It is likely a combination of things that will improve your situation. (Unless you have a dog-slow hard drive, than the single best thing to do is get a good 7200rpm drive.)

\Dan

 

[moonshinemadness]

ram

 

[dullard]

A good SCSI drive is faster than the majority of ATA (so called IDE) drives. But the difference is not night and day. A very disk intensive program will even make a SCSI computer screetch to a halt. I think that if you have trouble just opening and closing programs then you likely have a lack of memory. You didn't say exactly how much memory you had - I'll assume you have 128 MB. Upgrading from 128 MB to 384 MB can make a tremendous difference. I just upgraded my parents computer this weekend. It would take 1-2 minutes to open/close anything (800 MHz Athlon). Pop in a $50 stick of memory and now it takes 1-2 seconds to open/close the same programs.

 

[0roo0roo]

yup, need scsi like multitasking with scsi u can have two drives copying to each other without your
system turning into a pile of poo. evenw ith dma ide eats cpu like mad.

he's not talking about speed of copying. i'm sure thats fine. its just that doing OTHER stuff while its copying will be poo!!!

 

[XBoxLPU]

for example, when I was running an IDE drive, when I ran a Virus Scan I could not do anything else. But than I moved to SCSI and a virus scan doesn't even slow down anything

 

[FishTankX]

First of all, for the record, I have 256MB of RAM.

Second of all, my two major complaints are copying (Dang they slow down other programs), Virus Scans, Defragmentation, and Kazaa.

What I really want to do is have IDE run without turning my system into a pile of mush.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
First of all, for the record, I have 256MB of RAM.

Second of all, my two major complaints are copying (Dang they slow down other programs), Virus Scans, Defragmentation, and Kazaa.

What I really want to do is have IDE run without turning my system into a pile of mush.

So are you saying you copy files, have virus scans, defrag your drive, and run Kazaa all at the same time? Well, there I have no solutio except for a HT processor or a dual cpu system, obviously with scsi drives. Maybe in a raid setup.

For defragmenting, run that at night before you sleep or something because trying to do things while it runs is a pain.
Virus scans, same deal, run them at night, or when you go to eat dinner. I'm assuming somewhere in your day there is 30 minutes where you are not at the computer.

For Kazaa, I don't know why that should have problems. Whats the rest of your system specs? Are you running on a 5400rpm drive or 7200rpm?

For copying, make sure the drive you are copying to is on another drive.

 

[FishTankX]

7200RPM Baracuda4. And I run 20-30 uploads at the same time, which is why it causes a problem.

My only request is being able to run *one* disk intensive task at a time, without the system mucking up.

 

[Jhhnn]

Not to be too harsh, but, uhh, you're basically asking your desktop computer to provide the same kind of performance you'd get from a dual processor server w/ 15K rpm scsi raid 5 and 2gigs of memory, right?

Turn off the virus scanner, for starters, then pare down the number of running processes as far as possible. Use a spyware scanner on a regular basis- having that stuff running on your machine is like dragging an anchor. Add at least a 512meg stick of RAM, investigate a RAID setup, or dedicate your Kazaa server to a separate machine.

Everything has its limitations, you can't drink whiskey from a bottle of wine...