Average disk performance?

[old.user4556]

All,

I've suspected my drive isn't as quick as it should be. After some rummaging on the net, it appears that XP's own defrag sucks; so i downloaded diskeeper lite and it was indeed heavily fragmented. This helped quite a bit, but when i run sandra's disk benchmark utility, it seems to come out a lot slower than I would expect.

The disk is a Western Digital Caviar PATA, 120 Gb, 7200 rpm, 8 MB Cache, ATA100 connected and running in UDMA mode 6 on the primary controller on an ABit AN7 nforce2 mobo.

I would have expected the drive to be faster than the IBM Deskstar with only 2 Mb cache, and it seems to be a fair whack slower than the 'equivalent' comparable drive.

I know sandra is synthetic and perhaps not totally accurate (so there may be nothing wrong with the speed), but can anyone offer any advice or any settings i've maybe missed to improve the disk performance?

If i don't run diskeeper lite for a week, then the drive index may fall as low as 19000 kB/s - nearly as slow as the ATA66, 2MB cache drive on the comparison chart.

G

 

[Xavier]

Bear in mind those benchmark scores it uses are taken when the tested drive is running as a secondary storage unit, if your WD disk is your primary master then it's being used by the OS and will appear to run slower in tests.

Xav

All,

I've suspected my drive isn't as quick as it should be. After some rummaging on the net, it appears that XP's own defrag sucks; so i downloaded diskeeper lite and it was indeed heavily fragmented. This helped quite a bit, but when i run sandra's disk benchmark utility, it seems to come out a lot slower than I would expect.

The disk is a Western Digital Caviar PATA, 120 Gb, 7200 rpm, 8 MB Cache, ATA100 connected and running in UDMA mode 6 on the primary controller on an ABit AN7 nforce2 mobo.

I would have expected the drive to be faster than the IBM Deskstar with only 2 Mb cache, and it seems to be a fair whack slower than the 'equivalent' comparable drive.

I know sandra is synthetic and perhaps not totally accurate (so there may be nothing wrong with the speed), but can anyone offer any advice or any settings i've maybe missed to improve the disk performance?

If i don't run diskeeper lite for a week, then the drive index may fall as low as 19000 kB/s - nearly as slow as the ATA66, 2MB cache drive on the comparison chart.

G

 

[old.user4556]

A'thankya!