Relatively slow uncached disk speed

[whoblitzell]

The average speed for a processor of my kind (Intel Pentium 4 2.60 gHz) is 38.08 MB/second, however mine is read from this test to be 22 MB/second. This is all data from the PCPitstop website

I am unsure what to do to remedy this problem, any input is appreciated.

My hardrive is a Samsung SV1204H with a capacity of 107 GB.

 

[kewlguy311]

I would try a different benchmark tool, sisoft sandra is a good one. If not you need to figure out what mode your drive is in, go into the device manager for your controllers and make sure your drive is in dma mode 5 or 6, if its in pio thats why its so slow and you can try changing it in windows or in your bios.

 

[whoblitzell]

There are many DMA modes in the BIOS list for my hard drive. There are numbers 0 through 5 for the PIO setting, and both also have an "Auto" setting.

Running at all auto settings tends to be just as slow as when I turned PIO to 0 and the DMA mode to "UDMA 5".

None of what I am trying is helping me so far, I'm also not sure whether to enable or diable 32 bit transfer.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[kewlguy311]

yup, use 32 bit transfer, select dma 5, also look for a option called bus mastering or something like that, check and see if your bios has a revert to performance defaults, that usually turns dma on, if you select failsafe it usually turns dma off.

 

[whoblitzell]

select dma 5

Does UDMA 5 count as DMA 5?

also look for a option called bus mastering or something like that

Does an option between "primary", "secondary" or "both" count?

check and see if your bios has a revert to performance defaults, that usually turns dma on, if you select failsafe it usually turns dma off.

It only has a "default setup" thing, so it is one option. I tried that already and it is just as slow on the benchmark.

I can't find the other benchmark utility called sisoft sandra you talked about.

Please reply when you can, and thanks.

 

[kewlguy311]

yes, udma will work, u stands for ultra. You have the option to only run your primary controller in udma and pio in secondary, i would select udma for both primary and secondary controllers.

Here is a link for sisoft sandra,
http://www.download.com/SANDRA-Standard/3000-2086-10299390.html?tag=lst-0-1

 

[whoblitzell]

PIO isn't able to be turned off, it has only a 0 through 5 setting and then an auto. Setting it to 0, from what I can tell, hasn't helped.

My second and more major problem is that Sandra's "File System benchmark" (presumably the one that tests for uncached disk speed and is the PCPitStop equivalent) won't run because it says "Warning: The test file is too fragmented (46 fragments)! Defragment drive fully!"

I found this unlikely as I had ironically just ran Windows defragmenter. I used the trial version of Diskeeper to also defragment the drive.

Neither is allowing me to run the benchmark.

Help is appreciated as always

 

[Logical_1]

See if you can get a trial copy of O&O defrag. Maybe that will work better for you. I wouldn't think DisKeeper would help much after running the defrag from Windows since they are the same program (the one in Windows is the "lite" version of DisKeeper Professional).

 

[whoblitzell]

I think I might have answered my own question:

http://www.pcmag-mideast.com/print.php?id=EpulyVVFlkAVVxhTJk

The hard drive is slow according to this review, but the average read speed was 32 MB/second and the average write was 17 MB/second.

Averaging these (as I assume PCPitStop.Com does) yields 24.5 MB/second.

The problem is seemingly that I have a slow crap drive that was built for people that are nazi-ish about having silent hard drives.

Thanks to all anyways, I'd still like to get that other benchmark to work =///

Update:

The Sandra benchmark still won't run, I have now ran three defragmentation programs on my hard drive and it is still saying there are too many fragments on the "test file".

I am starting to lose faith in this program.