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CPU/MB upgrade = Poor Disk Performance

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by pcole11

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I just replaced my PII-350 with an Athlon
850 and AMD approved main board. I also replaced my old 5400 rpm with a new Maxtor 7200 rpm, Ultra ATA 100. The new mainboard
supports all the lastest IDE interfaces. I have the IDE interface set to "Auto" in the BIOS. I have not been impressed with the
system's performance. I just ran a system performance test against a baseline Asus Athlon 750. My system out-perfomed the baseline in all but the disk tests, where it resulted in a poor average 3 MB/sec xfer rate.
When I built the system, I set up the new faster drive as a slave and used Norton Ghost to xfer the drive contents. Was this a mistake? My drive is suppsed to be able to
have 100 MB/sec xfer rates. Do I have to
re-install Windows 98 from scratch? Do slave
devices have any effect on the xfer rate I am getting from the master device? Is there a utility that can tell me what interface is being run on the drive? Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Paul

13 replies

by tbradley

Not clear on a couple of topics - you said you set the newer drive up as a slave and transferred files, but is the older drive still in the system?

You disk performance will only be as strong as the weakest link. If the old drive is still in thechain, pull it out. Do not put a CD-rom or Zip IDE device on the chain, and re-run your benchmarks.

Try forcing your BIOS settings into the highest performance mode instead of "auto". There may be some drive translation, and if you can't get thenew drive to run at the higher specs, this may be the reason.

If you haven't deleted your old drive yet, try an experiment, with your new drive as master, ide1, CD rom as master, ide2, and do a quick load of windows to see how it performs.

Yes, slave devices do affect the xfer rate, and your ide chain will only perform at the rate of the slowest device.

Ziff Davis has a program called winbench that does an outstanding job of testing not only the ide interface, but just about every other aspect of your pc.

http://www.zdnet.com/etestinglabs/stories/benchmarks/0,8829,2326114,00.html

by pcole11

I removed the CDROM from the Primary controller, so the HD is the only drive.
No change in performance. I also tried
forcing PIO modes 3 and 4 as opposed to AUTO in the BIOS. The only choices for
UDMA are Auto or DISABLE, so I left that
at Auto. Mo matter what I do, I'm only
getting 3 - 3.5 MB per sec.

by pcole11

The new drive is the primary Master and my CDROM drive is the slave drive. I have another 5400 ATA/33 drive as the secondary Master and a CR/RW slave.
I will try removing the CDROM from the Primary and re-benchamark.

by montea7

First what motherboard are you using?
While the drive and system support ATA100 in all likelyhood your real world results will be in the 60-70 burst range. At any rate to help with your current problem I need to know what motherboard.

by kgosnell

Windows in some cases turns of the DMA function by default and sets it to the slowest speed, you can check off as many speedups as you want and it will revert to the default , you will have to go into the registry and reset it, I don't have the filefor this in front of me and don't remember where it is , so you are going to have to go to the help section at Microsoft and get the settings, but it's no big deal , and it was designed to prevent trouble in earlier types of drives.
Good luck , I will watch and see how you make out , perhaps one of the TechRepublic people have the proper settings , but likely you will have to verify it , hence Microsoft.

by saihib

O.K. Here's my two cents worth on this one. First of all, 100 MBps is only a theoretical maximum. Not to be confused with 100 Mbps (there is a difference) Nobody ever sees that at a sustained rate. It only applies to transfers of small amounts of data for extremely short periods of time. (I'm talking nanoseconds here). A slave device can have an effect on data transfer rate. The relevant factor is the speed of the slave device relative to the capacity of the master or whatever device is communicating with the slave. As far as utilities that tell you interfaces, Windows System Informaton or Device Manager should give you most of the info you need.

by saihib

We use GHOST alot at work and it definitely leaves ghosts in the machine. We've had a lot of incompatability problems. Beware!

by pcole11

Thanks for all your help. I decide to reinstall the drivers even though they all seemed to be okay. Turns out that the mainboard driver installation program had the DMA driver unselected by default. Can't remember if I selected this or not the first time.
After I reinstalled (with DMA driver selected), getting much better xfer rates, averaging 12-16 MB/sec, and surpassing the Athlon 750 baseline I was benchmarking against.

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