Slow read rate on hard drive

[Shwick]

I have a Western Digital 80GB IDE hard drive that’s been working fine for four years now. Its jumper setting is configured as cable select, and it’s connected to the master on my IDE cable. The hard drive gets about 38 MB/s read, tested with hd-tach. My dvd writer is plugged into the slave on the same IDE cable.

HD tach

Sisoft Sandra

I installed a second Western Digital Caviar SE 200GB IDE hard drive today.

http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=15080DR1648

The jumper setting for the 200GB drive is configured as cable select. The drive is connected to the slave slot on a second ide cable instead of the master slot because it’s neater that way. There is nothing connected to the master slot. However, I formatted the drive to be a master from Windows, so it shows up in the bios as a master. The 200GB drive produces a 32 MB/s read rate with hd-tach and sisoft sandra with about 13ms seek rate, even though its rated for 93.5 MB/s and should probably produce 60 MB/s when functioning properly. 32 MB/s is clearly too low.

HD tach

Sisoft Sandra

Also, the pattern in the graph from hd-tach is really weird- it seems like the read rate remains constant instead of declining like normal hard drive behaviour.

I updated my bios from 1006 to the latest non-beta version 1013 but the read rate remained the same.

No other programs were open/running when I ran the benchmarks.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here?

Thanks




System specs:
Asus A7V8X-X Motherboard (socket A)
Amd Athlon 2500+
1 GB ram
Windows XP Home SP2

 

[Gorankar]

For the first drive, unplug your dvd drive and retest.. If it scores faster, then connect that drive with the other hd drive on the same cable.. Optical drives and HD drives often do not get along well on the same ribbon cable.. Or rather they get along but the HD slows down..
On the second drive that is only getting 32, seems like it is set to ata 33.. This could be because you are using a 40 pin 40 conductor ata 33 ribbon cable instead of the 40 pin 80 conductor ata 66/100/133 cable, or because you have it set to ata 33 in the bios or Windows.. Also, smart errors can cause Windows to lower the speed of the hd interface...

Check your controllers in device manager to find out what the drive is set at.. Hope it helps..

 

[Nenu]

I have a WD 200GB drive and have to say its not the quickest drive.
The WD drives of 250GB upwards perform much better.
However as you have noticed, that graph does not represent the DTR of the drive at all.

You can use the Hard Disk Controllers driver to quickly speed test the drives.

Goto Device Manager and find IDE/ATA controllers.
Double click each controller and look under the Primary and Secondary Channel tabs to see if you have found the ones with your drive connected.
Once you have found one with a drive, you will see a Speed test button, press it.

My 200GB WD drive gives the following results:
Theoretical 150 MB/s
Burst 69.9 MB/s
Sustained 45.7 MB/s

You are interested only in the sustained transfer rate figure, the others are the cached data transfer rates.

Note:
When I first ran the test, it only returned results for Theoretical and Burst.
Running it again gave the Sustained result.

I agree with GORANKAR that you are likely running the wrong cable on an IDE drive or the controller has been set to not use the correct DMA mode in Device Manager.

 

[Shwick]

Thanks for the help, i'll check device manager and my ide cable.

 

[Shwick]

upgraded to 80 conductor IDE cable, works properly now, thanks.

Proper Read Speed

 

[Nenu]

Nice
Thank GORANKAR, he got it first