WD 200GB ATA-100 w/ 8 MB Cache Buffer extremely slow! Why??

[hayesb2]

I have a new AMD64 3200+ system w/ 1GB RAM. My Hard Drive is a Western Digital 200GB ATA-100 (8 mg cache buffer).
I defrag often but my hard drive constantly is running. I close out programs via msconfig, run spyware bot and destroy and spyware and it still runs alot.
Anyways, I ran SiSoft Sandra 2004 and here are my results:
Drive Index 16556kB/s
Buffered Read - 65 Mb/s
Seq Read - 21 Mb/s
Randon Read - 7 mb/s
Buffered Write - 22 mb/s
Seq Write - 20 mb/s
Randon Write - 20 mb/s
Access Time - 6 ms

I verified DMA is enabled. It is set to DMA Ultra Mode 5. This is correct right?
I thought a hard drive like this would fly...I'm hoping I have something set wrong..

 

[champmanfan]

Just a quick reply.

Set your PCs role as a Nework Server in Control Panel under System/Performance/File System. Also try a really good hard disk util called Cacheman to further optimize your PC in general. Turn off Antivirus/Firewalls when not needed.

 

[Freestone]

I think the key here is you saying "my hard drive constantly is running". If this is true, then any benchmark results will be skewed because of the competition for hard drive access.

Have you run any virus scan lately? Try a couple of free online scanners from smah's faq760-3862

If they don't find anything, report back and we'll see if we forum members can help you find what is accessing your drive so much.

 

[cdogg]

First of all, your access time of 6ms is excellent.

Secondly, what kind of times were you expecting? Remember that the fastest drives out there rarely average more than 45MB/s in overall transfer speed. Although you have an ATA-100 drive, that doesn't mean you're going to get anywhere near 100MB/s.

If you average your Buffered and Seq read times, it comes to 43MB/s. That isn't bad at all. Your write speed , however, is a little slower than I would expect. But nevertheless, these speeds are still right above average for such a large hard drive.

Is the hard drive on its own IDE channel, or is it sharing it with another device?

~cdogg
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