Insanely low HD score...HELP!

[Snorfle]

On my new Athlon X2 3800+, with a new Seagate ST3400632A 7200 RPM 400 GB as the main C: drive, I'm geting unthinkably low HD scores. I dled PerformanceTest in the first place because my computer seemed sluggish, and now I see why:

Disk - Sequential Read 2.63
Disk - Sequential Write 2.68
Disk - Random Seek + RW 1.43

It wasn't like this the first week or so, it's only recently. I thought it was my video card drivers for a while. Now I guess I see it has to be the HD, but what the heck is going on .3here???

The rest of my settings are below, in case there's something I missed:

CPU Manufacturer:AuthenticAMD
Number of CPU: 1 (2 Core(s)/CPU, 1 Logical(s)/Core)
CPU Type: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
CPU Speed: 1999.2 MHz
Cache size: 512KB
O/S: Windows XP (WIN32)
Total RAM:804499456 Bytes
Available RAM:470470656 Bytes
Video settings: 1280x1024x32
Video driver
DESCRIPTION:
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS
MANUFACTURER:
GeForce 6800 GS
BIOS:
Version 5.40.02.57.02
DATE:
12/29/05
Drive Letter: C
Total Disk Space: 372.6 GBytes
Cluster Size: 4 KBytes
File system:NTFS

Test Name This Computer
CPU - Integer Math 114.40
CPU - Floating Point Math 653.34
CPU - Find Prime Numbers 197.68
CPU - SSE/3DNow! 2445.70
CPU - Compression 3095.08
CPU - Encryption 23.99
CPU - Image Rotation 526.69
CPU - String Sorting 1513.63
Graphics 2D - Lines 79.49
Graphics 2D - Rectangles 300.50
Graphics 2D - Shapes 18.65
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text 233.19
Graphics 2D - GUI 253.62
Graphics 3D - Simple 1218.49
Graphics 3D - Medium 270.68
Graphics 3D - Complex 26.27
Memory - Allocate Small Block 1610.73
Memory - Read Cached 962.86
Memory - Read Uncached 869.17
Memory - Write 702.57
Memory - Large RAM 119.66
Disk - Sequential Read 2.63
Disk - Sequential Write 2.68
Disk - Random Seek + RW 1.43
CD - Read 5.67
CPU Mark 726.60
2D Graphics Mark 656.27
Memory Mark 3151
Disk Mark 24.36
CD Mark 693.57
3D Graphics Mark 484.99
PassMark Rating 470.31

[David (PassMark)]

Yes that is low. I have seen better performing floppy disk drives.

Without the PC in front of us, we can only guess at possible causes.

- Missing or wrong motherboard device drivers
- An almost full hard drive. Hard to imagine wth 400GB.
- A really really fragmented drive
- A bad cable or hardware, causing a fall back to a old slow PIO mode. (instead of faster DMA modes)
- Anti-virus software or spyware / viruses causing problems.

Background:
PIO = Programmed I/O. This is orginal method from the 1990's used to read data from hard drives as part of the ATA standard. For example PIO mode 0 = 3.3MB/Sec. PIO is the fallback mode, when the system can not use DMA or Ultra-DMA modes.

------
David

[Snorfle]

Thanks for the reply. After doing some work, I know at least part of it was the PIO mode. I had to reinstall the Primary IDE drivers (and for some reason my device manager shows 2 Primary IDE controllers and 2 Secondary IDE Controllers, + a VIA Bus Master IDE Controller...the heck??) and it went back into Ultra DMA Mode 5. It still was around 33 MB/sec (I used HDTune to test also), which seems slow for a drive this new but at least it's acceptable. I should also mention that I'm 99% sure I'm using a 80-pin connector, so that shouldn't slow me down...argh.