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My womans computer has me baffled... Its running slower than snot and its a 1.33 Athlon on a 8k7a. Has a Maxtor 15gig ata/100 7200 rpm drive. Below are the HDTach scores.



Now this is way too slow if you ask me. The Seek time should be about 12ms or faster just like my 40 Gig Maxtor in my computer.... I've updated the via's done this and that only thing left is to try a new cable... Is it possible that this hard drive is going bonkers on me? Running Win2k Pro with Sp2 Device Manager says Ultra DMA and thats it... Shouldn't it say Mode 5 if its running ata100? LMK what your opinions are on this... I'm about ready to toss this thing out... Funny thing is... I've got her old computer a Celeron @550 running as my server with XP and its smoking this Athlon cause of the hard drive speed. I have a 80 Gig 5400 rpm Maxtor D540x in the server and its scores are a lot better... Oh bios does show the drive as mode 5 so... who knows...

Up c'mon guys i know someone has to have some opinions on this don't make me take it to bannandtech...

God, i don't know how you survive on such a slow HDD.. i mean, 23 MS seek time!! YIKES that is SLOW!

I wish I could help, but the most obvious things i would reccommend you have probably already tried:

1. Check cord connection
2. Maybe it's overheating?
3. Are there some major errors on the disk?

Ah, I wouldn't be able to help much, but I know someone can.

Obvious/Stupid Questions:

1. Running any programs while preforming test?

2. Latest VIA/AMD drivers?

3. Using an on-board IDE controllers (non-RAID or RAID)?

4. All PCI Latency Patches and such have been installed?

5. Using an 80 conductor cable?

Also when I used a VIA IDE controller on my KT7A-RAID mobo, my transfer rates were not as high as they should have been, since there are tests that show IDE preformance suffers with VIA chipsets due to I/O usage or the like.

I had this same board in my computer with the same hard drive at one time and it ran fine... ata/100 cable all the latest drivers... i've done absolutely everything i can possibly think of short of pullin' the HDD out and testing it in my computer and i really don't wanna do that cause her desk is a PITA but thats the only thing i haven't done is test it in another config. I am using the onboard controller... Shit i just had a brain fart... Her old config is my server now... Abit BH6 Celeron @550 with a Promise ATA/100 card... I'm starting to believe it is the hard drive now. Cause i remember when i benchmarked the same 15 gig drive on that system it was running really slow then. I've got an 80 Gig hard drive on that controller now that is ata100 and 5400rpm and it smokes this 7200rpm drive. Maybe i should just get ahold of maxtor and RMA it... I doubt they have any 15 gig drives so i might get a free upgrade.

Sweet, that's what I would do.. Good luck man!

Go here and get powermax. It's a utility to test the hard drive. Hopefully it will tell you if you need to rma it or not. I've used it before and it has worked well for me. good luck

I was gonna do that but is there a way to disable the write test i hate to have it wipe hte drive clean if it don't have to.

I haven't used it in a while so I'm not really sure. Try and see, it'll tell you if you need to do that. I don't believe so though.

well its looking like its the hard drive going out on me... I pulled it and put it in my computer... Still slower than snot while my 40 gigger same speed hard drive is cruising along where it should be... Looks like its RMA time for this puppy.

The seek time is about the only thing that shouldn't be affected by cables, drivers, software, or anything else. It is all up to the hard drive to do the seeking for you.

Sounds bad to me.

Well i got the seek time figured out... The acoustical managment software that maxtor has fixed it... This thing came from the factory set with it running full board so the drive was quiet. That explains the slow seek times of 24-29ms i've seen in the tests... Its now seeking at 14ms... and i found out this is only a 5400rpm drive when i was told it was a 7200... bastards! Anyways my read burst speeds are still low... Tried 2 different cables and its still slow so what could i do to speed that up? Its running about like its an ata66 drive instead of a ata100 drive.

yup...I've had very good luck with maxtor hdds...

but I refuse to run one without setacm'ing it

Just for comparisons, here is mine:

This is on an Abit BF6 mobo with only DMA3 controllers, even though the IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40 gig is ATA100.

Low burst rates = VIA problem w/ IDE and PCI bus.