poor harddrive performance

weaksauce

Regular
"Drive Index" 22mb/s
"Random Access Time" 12ms

The drive is on Ultra DMA 5 and I've recently defragmented it...

So.. What may be the catch?
 
"Drive Index" 22mb/s
"Random Access Time" 12ms

The drive is on Ultra DMA 5 and I've recently defragmented it...

So.. What may be the catch?

What is the name of the HDD brand and model and what was the perfomance before (as a reference).
 
Access time looks quite normal for a consumer harddrive.

While the data transfer rate is rrather low it's not likely to hold you back that much. It's not often the average user does such large transfers all in one go.

Seeks is what slows you down. And those were pretty alright all things considered.

Have you tried another benchmark program? maybe the one you got is a bit wonky.
Peace.
 
What is the name of the HDD brand and model and what was the perfomance before (as a reference).

I don't know the performance beforhand but it's an Acer Travelmate 6003LMI with Hitachi 60GB 4200rpm ( IC25N060ATMR04-0 ). Averege read in HD tach is 21,8mb/s (the previous was from Sandra). HD tach also gave me 18.8ms random access. (in sandra the meter ends at 12ms so maybe it reach some limit i dunno)

What annoys me is that it takes time for menus to come up and small things like that in XP, and of course downloading and unraring kindof takes the juice away. Starting programs takes quite a time too. I'm just figuring a PC like this should be able to run XP smoothly. I have performance settings on visuals...

Got all the latest driver, deleted virus and spyware...

Maybe a format would have done it but I can't since I lack a ROM drive.
 
Do you know if it's SATA or PATA? There are quite a few under-performing SATA chips out there and we're talking laptop hard drive to boot. Any idea what chipset your laptop uses?
 
I don't know the performance beforhand but it's an Acer Travelmate 6003LMI with Hitachi 60GB 4200rpm ( IC25N060ATMR04-0 ). Averege read in HD tach is 21,8mb/s (the previous was from Sandra). HD tach also gave me 18.8ms random access. (in sandra the meter ends at 12ms so maybe it reach some limit i dunno)

Laptop hard-drives suck for performance. 4200rpm being the worst of the worst. To be honest your performance figures don't look particularly unexpected for such a drive. As for Windows menus taking forever, this seems just to be the way Windows gets after time.
 
Laptop hard-drives suck for performance. 4200rpm being the worst of the worst. To be honest your performance figures don't look particularly unexpected for such a drive. As for Windows menus taking forever, this seems just to be the way Windows gets after time.

Well that sucks. Is there no program that can "rejuvenate" windows, then?
 
Is there no program that can "rejuvenate" windows, then?

Dunno. I've not found one. There are registry cleaners and defraggers, personally I steer clear of those (they strike me as akin to performing brain surgery using a blender -- if they go wrong, you'll be doing a reinstall anyway!).

Maybe others will have some suggestions.
 
I find this to be a great time to remind people:

Transfer speed means nothing when you're talking about the interface (SATA, PATA, DMA, UltraDMA, ATA6/5/4/3/3/1).

The only speed that matters is the rotational speed of the disk itself and the seek times. Sata's vaunted 3gbit transfer speed tells you nothing except how fast the controller chip on the hard drive's PCB can talk to the controller on your motherboard. In practice, your 4200RPM drive would go just as fast on SATA as it would on the ancient 40-pint parallel-ATA in mode 2.

It's like putting Z-rated racing compound tires (180+MPH / 300kph) on a 1990 Geo Metro (3cyl, 55hp, carbed). "Gee, why isn't my Geo Metro going so slow? The tires are 180mph!!!"

Next time anyone reading this goes looking to buy a hard drive, don't consume the hype about the interface -- look at the drive specs. A 10,000RPM Raptor on SATA 1.5Gbit will run circles around a 5400RPM Travelstar on SATA 3.0Gbit.
 
I find this to be a great time to remind people:

Transfer speed means nothing when you're talking about the interface (SATA, PATA, DMA, UltraDMA, ATA6/5/4/3/3/1).

I mentioned UDMA5 to assure it wasn't set on PIO, so that wasn't the problem.

Though I checked a benchmark and sadly this performance seem to be normal. Kind of bugs me out, since this computer more or less wasn't "meant" to run smoothly. Shit, not to speak of some laptops being released with vista on 512MB ram.
 
I concur that that's on par for 4200rpm drives. That's exactly why I replaced mine with a 7200rpm (in my notebook). It sucks more power and heats up more, but damn if it isn't great to have a drive that's faster than my USB hard drive. I was loading games off of that external drive because the laptop one was horrible.:LOL:
 
Though I checked a benchmark and sadly this performance seem to be normal. Kind of bugs me out
Don't worry.

When Albu said transfer rate means nothing, that's because it actually means nothing heh.

Well, almost anyway. Unless you process a lot of raw soudn and video clips it really doesn't matter very much if you have a 20MB/s transfer rate or 80MB/s.

It's not often you read/write files that are many tens or even hundreds of megabytes in size. Seeks tend to be far more predominant when judging HDD performance.

Each time you boot your system your drive seeks thousands of times reading/writing allkinds of stuff. If you can shave off a few ms per seek that means entire seconds shorter boot time in the end.

The actual time spent reading or writing is relatively speaking very minor compared to the seek itself. If a drive reads ~40kb at 20MB/s or 80MB/s for a fast desktop drive is not going to make muhc difference compared to all the time wasted while seeking to find that bit of data.

To put it in other terms..
If you have a 2.5GHz C2D or Athlon X2 or whatever they're called these days then:

0.0000000004s <-Processor clock cycle period.
0.012s <- your harddrive's access time.

So harddrive mechanics is kinda slow in comparison you might say! :LOL:
Peace.
 
The only time a interface above about UDMA66 would matter is if you get lucky and your data is in the drive's buffer. Obviously, that only helps so much. Even a Raptor has a tough time moving 60+ MB/s on even sequential, contiguous accesses. Access times and resulting random access performance on HDDs is just disgustingly awful.

HDDs = icky.
 
Well that sucks. Is there no program that can "rejuvenate" windows, then?

Clean install.

Or my solution: Ubuntu 7.04...much nicer than SuSE 10.1. I'm now doing everything but gaming in Linux (including web devel and some CAD). Much zippier and hasn't slowed down yet.
 
no no no its flash based
get one of these ddr based

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct

8000x faster at finding files than a 10,000 rpm SATA WD Raptor WD740ADFD
5500x faster at finding files than a 15,000 rpm SAS Seagate Savvio or Maxtor Atlas 15k II SAS drive
125x faster at serving files than a WD Raptor, certainly the fastest SATA drive on the market.
110x faster at serving files than any 15,000 rpm U320 SCSI or SAS drive.
700x faster at serving and receiving files than the latest Samsung laptop flash drives.

or better still get me one :D
 
Yeah, it being a notebook drive and at 4200 RPM is what's causing the poor performance. Also, how much memory does your laptop have? When I upgraded my Windows XP machine from 512 MB of memory to 1 gig of memory it made the thing fly. This is on an Athlon XP 2800+. So you can see upgrading memory might help and will definitely help with regular things by keeping more things in the nice fast RAM.
 
This is what I would do is replace the hard drive with a larger like 80gig or up 5400RPM drive. I would not go with a 7200RPM for the heat it produces and the amount of power it draws. There are many notebooks that can't use a 7200RPM because it causes the notebook to over heat but about 99% or notebooks can use a 5400RPM drive. If you don't want to lose your data or OS you can plug your hard drive in a desktop with the new drive and use Norton Ghost to copy boot track and all to the new drive and then just install the new drive in the notebook.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148128

PS
you will need a converter so you can plug your notebook drives to a desktop and you will need one for each notebook drive but there cheap and come in handy.
http://www.casecooler.com/3drto2dr.html
 
get one of these ddr based
Ehm. They cost US$4.5k for 16GB.

Most people would not deem these units worth the asked price no matter what the performance..

Besides: DAMN UGLY!

Interestign: they're made with FPGAs and not "proper" ASICs. Should theoretically help keep down manufacturing and development costs but if they cost roughly the same a sa decent used car then you'd have to be pretty hardcore to get one.

Impressive if it really boots windows in a couple seconds but DAMN they're expensive! Wake me up when they start approaching HDD prices thanks. Oh and at least quadruple in capacity.
Pewace.
 
Back
Top