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ATA on Nforce2 slooowwww

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Hooner

Technical User
Dec 4, 2003
31
GB
Hello chaps, I must apologise, I feel a bit of a fraud as I'm far from the professional the membership form wanted me to be.

I've searched Google til my eyes bled, posted various "amateur" forums with no success, please help me?

Trying to get my ATA/100 HDD to run at a decent speed off my Nforce2 IDE controller (mobo, not PCI). At the moment it's behaving as if it was in PIO mode, but Xp has the IDE controller listed as ATA, and the BIOS has Ultra DMA set to auto.

So why can't I get a decent speed out of it? it's chugging along like something out of the Flintstones, wouldn't be surprised to open it and find a lizard running on a wheel.

It's all setup correctly, right cable (tried 2), correct jumper settings, this is the only drive on the IDE channel, Nforce2 ATA drivers are the latest from Nvidia.

I used to like computers, more importantly, they used to like me, I feel this is going to test our relationship..............

Many thanks to any who read this.
 
Well uncached speed is much faster
measure on fat32 than NTFS.
As for the cached speed the HDD buffer makes a
great improvment .

The reason loading games might be slow
can be that you only have 256MB ram .
512MB would improve things , less usage
of HDD as paged memory.

You could aslo tweak some windows setting to
free up some memory .
Turning off some of the visual stuff.

And skip the blizz background picture ,
set the desktop to 16bit instead of 32bit.

That's the tips i can think of right now .
 
Btw i hope you answered yes to install the nvidia ide
software driver . It increase speed .
 
I knew you'd bring the RAM issue up, lol. 256 was damn fine before I upgraded my machine, and it still doesn't alter the fact that my drive is going the same speed as a ATA/33 drive.

I appreciate your help, you've been great, I think we'll just have to admit defeat on this day. I've really had enough over the past few days with new parts not working, or working incorrectly, poor customer service, I've had it up to the eyeballs. I'm going to buy a Playstation.........
 
I am still skeptical that the hard drive is the problem.

Have you tried benchmarking your PC with something like SiSoft Sandra or PCMark? Perhaps the slowness is only occurring due to the game, video card driver, or improper settings within the game.

512MB of RAM, like it or not, is XP's sweet spot amount. 256MB can usually cut it though, and shouldn't really slow down hard drive access that much. Since you've pretty much got a clean install of XP, it wouldn't hurt to delete the partition, re-create an NTFS one, and reload XP once more if you've got the time (you could use the FAT32-NTFS converter, but it's less efficient). It's worth a shot. If your current partition (C:) is larger than 32GB, file access times could significantly improve with NTFS. Also, using an old partition from a previous OS can cause problems in XP. I think you mentioned this was a new drive, but just thought I'd throw that out there in case you did an image or file transfer from the old drive.


~cdogg
[tab]"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
[tab][tab]- A. Einstein
 
Fat32 & ntfs well you decide.
cdogg doesn't mention a thing i always do.
I always try to have fragmention at a minimum,
especially at the system drive.


To obtain this i do the following.
What makes fragmention of data occur.
-Installing programs.
-Temporary internet files & cookies.
-Pagefile that grows.
-Other temporary files ( cd burning etc)

I have four partitions.
First (C:) for windows only
Second (H:) for temp files and pagefile
Third (D:) for installed programs ,games utilities etc.
Fourh (M:) for archiving data , storage , backups.

(The drive letters are what i have i my system)

C: is 10GB witch is enough for windows
and some permanently installed MS$ programs.

Moved the swap file/pagefile to H:
setting it to fixed size (min=max same size)
Move the location of "My Documents" to H:
Made H: \temp_inet
Moved the temporary internet folder to it.
Made H: \temp_cd
Cd/dvd burning software use that space/dir for temp data



Have C: drive around 10GB
Have C: drive at the beginning of the drive(fastest part)
Have a (H:) drive TEMP-drive used for pagefile
and other temp files.

Install all other programs utils games to D:\Program Files

Storage place is Fourth (M:) witch in my case now is a external USB 2.0 dive.For holding downloads,archive data,
backups etc.

Then i use a third party defragmenter (i use raxco
Perfect disk 6)
Optimize placement of system files at C:
Defragments offline FAT32's table NTFS's metadata&MFT
and defraggs the paging file so it's one large
file in contigous sectors/clusters .

SYAR
 
One more thing.
Diasble the indexing service.
Before disabling, uninstall this via the Add/Remove Programs windows components Control Panel applet.
 
SYAR does bring up a good point about fragmentation, but that's probably not the problem if you just did a clean install of XP on a blank drive. Otherwise, it may be something you want to consider.
 
It will not be right anyway to compare your disk
ceche/uncashe speed with my pc.
You run a cpu/memory with 266mhz and i with 400mhz .
It's natural the my read write speed is faster than yours.
 
cdogg an xp-installation is only clean for a couple of days or so.
My advice is not to have one big partition with
everything in it regardless if it is ntfs or fat32.
I will give more flexibility when it comes
to doing defrags also.
What do you think is the difference in time defragmenting
10GB contra 80GB .
This i think is one reason why people have a great
amount of fragmentation.
They dont bother with it ,because it takes to long.

We always setup servers with a system partition
for windows , a data partition , and a archive partition .
There is no reason not to do this at workstations with large drives also .

And the indexing service "away with that" ,only servers
may have use for it.

 
I totally agree about partitioning. You should always keep the system partition under 20GB when possible. I've never recommended any different.


~cdogg
[tab]"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
[tab][tab]- A. Einstein
 
Thanks a lot for your help guys, I hear what you're saying about defrag, and I run it twice a day. Yeah, partition size occurred to me too, as Xp is just bouncing around in 70 gig of space, but I solved the problem anyways.

I downloaded a set of generic drivers from Leadtek's website, isolated the IDE driver and installed it, everything seems to be fine now. Went back to PCPitstop and re-marked, my uncached speed has now improved by just over 30%.

I know we went through the whole driver issue, but I didn't expect to find anything other than the latest nForce2 drivers (which we had already ruled out as being useless, at least with my board) at Leadtek. It appears I was wrong, an old revision of the nForce2 IDE driver was what I needed it seems, but who would have thought that?

Anyway, there we go, am up and running now thanks to you guys. You may not have hit the nail on the head, but you were pushing me in the right direction and giving me ideas, so thanks a lot. And have a good Christmas!
 
Thats good , happy to hear you got it sorted out.
I guess we have covered a lot of tweaks/optimization
possibilities here in this post .Even if you had a driver problem.
To improve disk speed all my advice apply ,
as i have been to several testing processes optimizations
over the time.

Cheers and have a good Christmas to you to.
[santa3]
 
One more update, lol. It appears the drivers were not the problem after all, my results on PCPitstop turned out to be a fluke and I was no better off than before, like my drive wouldn't come out of PIO mode............

I formatted my HDD and started again this morning, this time doing a FULL format. When I first installed the new drive I only quick-formatted it, could that have been the root of my problems?

I reckon so as my computer is flying along as it should be now, brings a tear to my eye................
 
Glad the format & reinstall worked for you!

[cheers]


~cdogg
[tab]"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
[tab][tab]- A. Einstein
 
Thats good don't let dumb computers let your head explode
of frustration , always looking for solutions and never
give up is my motto.
[bomb]

 
Hello all.
I found this forum looking for solutions to the same problem as Hooner. I want to add some info to the problem.

My system is a new installation of WinXP, registered, all drivers installed, NTFS on the disks (Samsung 80GB and 160GB), Athlon xp2800, 1GB RAM. In standard applications I never noticed, that there was a problem with the speed of the ide drives. Then I transfered a 4xdvd-rw into the system. This drive in my other pc with VIA chipset MB runs full speed, 4x was no problem. In the NFORCE2 system it doesn't even run with 2x speed!!
I checked the transfer speed of the hd's with nero:
Old system (VIA): ~12MB/sec
New system (NF2): ~4MB/sec max !!!
NF2 3 times slower than VIA? Unbelievable!

As Hooner did, I changed drivers, checked settings (all showing UDMA 5 etc as shown above) without effect. Fragmentation is no point, the data are fresh on a clean partitions.
I don't understand this behaviour. Also I'm running out of ideas. I can try the formatting thing, but I can't believe, that this should help.
I really looks like the system runs in DMA2 or whatever, independent of the settings in the driver. Very bad...

Regards, DocMigru
 
The problem with mine Doc, was that it was a brand new drive, and I made the mistake of only quick formatting it straight out of the box, rather than the tiresome full format. Once I'd given it the full format, it was back up to speed.

So unless you only performed a quick format like I did, I doubt this is your problem.
 
The HDs are in use for some time, I wonder, what a full format would change? Nevertheless I tried it. Result ... no change. Nero still reports 4MB/sec. :(
To be honest, I expected that.
But here some new info:
I checked my second PC. This one had an VIA chipset KT266 (oooold...), but 12MB/sec in Nero. In the meantime I changed it to an NForce2 (Epox 8rda+, one of the earliest?) with all NVidia drivers. I started Nero and guess ... 4MB/sec. Aaaargh! But this time the OS is Win98, not XP. I removed (!) the NVidia driver and installed the Microsoft standard driver. You won't believe it, Nero shows something around 18MB/sec !!! This is enough for a theoretical 13x-DVDRW!
Unfortunately the same trick on the XP machine doesn't work. Here the MS standard driver was also glued to 4MB/sec. I really hate it. :(
If I find some time I'll take an image of my installation (fallback to avoid this unpleasant xp registration) and check a fresh XP installation without NVidia drivers, to be sure. If this shows fast HD access, what then? NVidia should really do something about their xp drivers!
Regards, DocMigru
 
Well have any of you installed the nvidia 3.13 chipset driver pack and with the nvidia sw-ide driver ENABLED .

I have that , and no problemo .

syar
 
First of all, I'll be the first to tell you that the Nvidia NForce2 board is easily superior to the older Via KT266. Also, there should be no problems with that motherboard and XP.

Since the problem only occurs with the XP system, it's definitely a driver or software issue. Have you made sure that the version of Nero you have is 100% compatible with XP? Have you tried to update it if any updates for your version exist on their site?

If that doesn't help, use another benchmark to test the throughput of your HDD, like Sisoft Sandra for example. I suspect that Nero is not giving you an accurate reading in XP.

Also, it would help to know your exact IDE configuration by listing the devices you have on each channel.

~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind"
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
 
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