I think my hard drive is slow, any way to prove it?

[Rob_Merritt]

My system that I got 6 months ago seems unusually slow in the hard drive access department. In benchmarks of video, cpu, and memory, my computer performs as expects. However there doesn't seem to be a decent hard drive benchmark anymore. They either want an unformated drive or give back a result that is meaningless.

My system seems to be getting slower. It takes about 5 minutes to be usuable from boot and general access seems a lot slower than it should. (note I have two gigs of ram so it isn't any virtual memory threashing) There doesn't seem to be any spyware or virus on the system, I've used msconfig and hijack this to make sure the boot up tasks are streamline.

I'm kind of wondering if I'm having a hardware issue or if my windows install is corrupt. Besides buying another hard drive and doing a freash install of windows, any ideas on how I can test to be sure? Any way I can rule out something screwy going on with the motherboard?

[Elton]

Before anyone else says it -- have you ever defragmented your drive?
Maybe it's a stupid or cliched thing to suggest, but if you add & delete stuff frequently, fragmentation will affect your performance noticeably in my experience (at least at work, where I've had to profile hard-drive-intensive processes).

[Rob_Merritt]

Yes, I defraged it. It was only ~1% fragmented and once finished, there was no improvement.

FYI, its a western digital IDE. Here is the page on its specs.

http://support.gateway.com/s/HARDDRV...06352sp2.shtml

[KaoFloppy]

Two things from me, assuming you're running XP:

1. Have you checked if the IDE channel that the hard disk is connected to is running in DMA mode or PIO mode? DMA is the faster one, and usually the correct DMA mode is autodetected. But sometimes if there were some weird bootup problems, XP will downgrade the IDE channel to PIO.
(How to check? Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Manager -> "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" -> "Primary IDE Channel" -> "Advanced Settings" tab.)
(My Nvidia nforce2 motherboard driver includes a speed test on this very page, so there's a "benchmark" right there.)

2. MS has a utility that, when run, collects stats during startup. It is used to debug startup problems, such as drivers causing time delays or whatever. Unfortunately I don't know what this is called, so you will have to search this yourself.

[WarrenM]

1. Have you checked if the IDE channel that the hard disk is connected to is running in DMA mode or PIO mode? DMA is the faster one, and usually the correct DMA mode is autodetected. But sometimes if there were some weird bootup problems, XP will downgrade the IDE channel to PIO.

That happened to me a few months. A CD was having trouble reading in my laptops drive, so Windows downgraded my hard drive to PIO mode (Yeah, I know, makes a lot of sense). It was almost unusable until I found the DMA switch to get it back to normal.

[RickH]

That happened to me a few months. A CD was having trouble reading in my laptops drive, so Windows downgraded my hard drive to PIO mode (Yeah, I know, makes a lot of sense). It was almost unusable until I found the DMA switch to get it back to normal.

Starforce?

EDIT: Look for a download of HD Tune, you'll get more info than you ever wanted about your drive.

[WarrenM]

Actually, no. I was trying to install and run Mage Slayer but apparently the game was too old and my DVD drive didn't like trying to read the CD.

[Rob_Merritt]

ok, ran HD tunr. Here is the output. Any red flags?

HD Tune: WDC WD3200BB-22KEA0 Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 36.3 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 63.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 54.5 MB/sec
Access Time : 13.6 ms
Burst Rate : 73.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 3.8%

HD Tune: WDC WD3200BB-22KEA0 Information

Firmware version : 08.05J08
Serial number : WD-WCAMR2784838
Capacity : 298.1 GB (~320.1 GB)
Buffer size : 2048 KB
Standard : ATA/ATAPI-6
Supported mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)
Current mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)

S.M.A.R.T : yes
48-bit Address : yes
Read Look-Ahead : yes
Write Cache : yes
Host Protected Area : yes
Device Configuration Overlay : yes
Automatic Acoustic Management: yes
Power Management : yes
Advanced Power Management : no
Power-up in Standby : no
Security Mode : yes
Firmware Upgradable : yes

Partition : 1
Drive letter : C:\
Label :
Capacity : 301006 MB
Usage : 84.23%
Type : NTFS
Bootable : Yes

Partition : 2
Drive letter : H:\
Label :
Capacity : 4235 MB
Usage : 42.34%
Type : FAT32
Bootable : No

HD Tune: WDC WD3200BB-22KEA0 Health

ID Current Worst ThresholdData Status
(01) Raw Read Error Rate 200 200 51 0 Ok
(03) Spin Up Time 195 185 21 5233 Ok
(04) Start/Stop Count 100 100 0 562 Ok
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 200 200 140 0 Ok
(07) Seek Error Rate 200 200 51 0 Ok
(09) Power On Hours Count 98 98 0 1823 Ok
(0A) Spin Retry Count 100 100 51 0 Ok
(0B) Calibration Retry Count 100 100 51 0 Ok
(0C) Power Cycle Count 100 100 0 528 Ok
(C2) Temperature 122 105 0 28 Ok
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C5) Current Pending Sector 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C6) Offline Uncorrectable 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C8) Write Error Rate 200 200 51 0 Ok

Power On Time : 1823
Health Status : Ok

[FIDGAF]

I have a WD 120 GB 7200 RPM IDE and those stats are very close to mine.

HD Tune: WDC WD1200JB-00GVA0 Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 32.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 53.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 45.3 MB/sec
Access Time : 12.6 ms
Burst Rate : 79.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 23.0%

HD Tune: WDC WD1200JB-00GVA0 Information

Firmware version : 08.02D08
Serial number : WD-WMAL91700080
Capacity : 111.8 GB (~120.0 GB)
Buffer size : 8192 KB
Standard : ATA/ATAPI-6
Supported mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)
Current mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)

S.M.A.R.T : yes
48-bit Address : yes
Read Look-Ahead : yes
Write Cache : yes
Host Protected Area : yes
Device Configuration Overlay : yes
Automatic Acoustic Management: yes
Power Management : yes
Advanced Power Management : no
Power-up in Standby : no
Security Mode : yes
Firmware Upgradable : yes

Partition : 1
Drive letter : C:\
Label : C: Drive Main - XP
Capacity : 114470 MB
Usage : 95.51%
Type : NTFS
Bootable : Yes


My access time and burst rate is better but your CPU usage is lower. What temperature is it running at? Heat kills drives too.

The biggest difference I see is that I have an 8Mb buffer and you have a 2Mb buffer from the looks of it. My drive is also VERY full right now.

I think that's about as fast as she'll go there Captain. The only way to go faster is with SATA.

[DeepT]

That happened to me a few months. A CD was having trouble reading in my laptops drive, so Windows downgraded my hard drive to PIO mode (Yeah, I know, makes a lot of sense). It was almost unusable until I found the DMA switch to get it back to normal.

This has happened to me a few times. I would switch it back to DMA, only to find out later windows switched it back to PIO mode. It kept doing this, and I didn't know why until later. It was switching to PIO mode because my HDD was going bad and it could not keep up with DMA speeds ( I guess). I ran a HDD test utility that was DOS based. My drive performance was pretty horrible. I then started backup all my files to another drive, and by the time it was finished, the throughput on my 'bad' drive had dropped to about 250k / sec. When the drive was stone cold, it was getting like 1.5 meg / sec.

So, if windows is switching your drive to PIO mode, it probably had a good reason to do that. If it keeps happening, I think you should replace your HDD.