hdd - bottleneck?

[dannyking1]

afternoon all,

i have run the performace test and i'm fairly happy with the results. Im running a Athlon XP 2200+ O/C to 2020Mhz and its bringing back results similar or better to the 3000+

There seems to be a major problem however, with the HDD speed, read and write.

I have noticed recently that my PC is alot slower than it used to be and i think this may be the problem. Its an Excelstor 40gb 7200RPM

Here are my benchmarking test results: (search for Athlon 2020, as its the only 1!)

Any Help appreciated

[David (PassMark)]

I had a look at the baseline #1214 (Microstar Athlon 2020) which I assume if your machine.

You are right. The disk results of 4MB/Sec for read and write are very low.

More typical results for current hardware would be between 30 - 50 MB/Sec.

Maybe you have some background activity using the hard disk?

Maybe it is your virus checker?

Maybe you disk is almost full and totally fragmented?

You should also check the SMART values, see,
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm
to make sure the drive is not dieing.

---
David

[dannyking1]

Cheers, yea that result is this machine.

I have tried defragmenting it, it was fragmented about 7 times per file. Which is quite bad. I have run the defragmentation program 3 times and they are now 'only' 5 times fragmentated. Performance seems the same and it seems like the defragmenter isnt really doing much difference.

I have run the pasmark software again and the results are the same.

I only have about 9gb free, but its only a 40gb drive.

I have also run the 'Diskcheck' software' but i don't know how to read the information (see below).

Please Help...


Drive 0 SMART enabled


IDE REGISTERS:

Features: 0x0 Sector Count: 0x1 Sector Number: 0x1

Cylinder Low: 0x0 Cylinder High: 0x0 Drive Head: 0xA0

Command: 0xEC


DRIVE INFORMATION:

Serial Number: VNVB17E20TQS1A

FirmWare Rev: V22OA63A

Model Number: ExcelStor Technology J340

Cylinders: 16383 Heads: 16 Sectors per track: 63

Cur Cyls: 16383 Cur Heads: 16 Cur Sectors/Track: 63

Bytes per track: NA Bytes per sector: NA

Gen Config: 1114 Buffer Type: 3 Buffer Size: 3643

Vendor Unique: 0 0 0 More Vendor Unique: 0x8010

ECC Size: 52 Double Word IO: 0 Capabilities: 12032

PIO Timing: 512 DMA Timing: 512 BS: 7

Current Sector Capacity: 16514064 Total Addressable Sectors: 80418240

Mult. Sector Stuff: 272 Single Word DMA: 0 Multi Word DMA: 7


SMART ATTRIBUTES:

ID Description Raw Value Status Value Worst Threshold

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Raw Read Error Rate 0 OK 100 100 60

2 Throughput Performance 0 OK 100 100 50

3 Spin Up Time 11206822ms OK 97 97 24

4 Start/Stop Count 1121 OK 100 100 0

5 Reallocated Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 5

7 Seek Error Rate 0 OK 100 100 67

8 Seek Time Performance 0 OK 100 100 20

9 Power On Time 5628 OK 100 100 0

A Spin Retry Count 0 OK 100 100 60

C Power Cycle Count 1004 OK 100 100 0

C0 Power off Retract Count 1286 OK 99 99 50

C1 Load/Unload Cycle Count 1286 OK 99 99 50

C2 Temperature 39 C OK 141 141 0

C4 Reallocation Event Count 0 OK 100 100 0

C5 Current Pending Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 0

C6 Offline Scan Incorrect. Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 0

C7 Ultra ATA CRC Error Count 17 OK 200 200 0

[David (PassMark)]

If there was a SMART problem is will say something like,
Raw Read Error Rate 0 FAIL 100 100 60

But you got all OK's.

I assume you are using the built in Windows XP defragmenter?

And I assume you are refering to the value in the fragmentation report called, "Average fragments per file"

If this "Average fragments per file" is equal to 5 or 7 on your machine then something is wrong. This is way too high. On my machine it is 1.06. Which I think is more typical.

It is hard to guess at what these problems are unless we have the machine in front of us to experiement with.

----
David