Very poor disk performance

[SteveBarnard]

Athlon XP 1800+ system running at 33Mhz with 1gb of RAM
and an IBM Deskstar 45gb 7200rpm ultra ata HDD. System
just not running well - ran SiSoft Sandra and the disk
benchmarks are VERY poor. XP-P recognized the drive from
BIOS and installed it's own drivers.

I'm looking for some other program to test the
speed/throughput/transfer-rate on the drive. Any
suggestions? WinBench? Please advise and thank in advance.

Steve

[Bob Willard]

SteveBarnard wrote:
> Athlon XP 1800+ system running at 33Mhz with 1gb of RAM
> and an IBM Deskstar 45gb 7200rpm ultra ata HDD. System
> just not running well - ran SiSoft Sandra and the disk
> benchmarks are VERY poor. XP-P recognized the drive from
> BIOS and installed it's own drivers.
>
> I'm looking for some other program to test the
> speed/throughput/transfer-rate on the drive. Any
> suggestions? WinBench? Please advise and thank in advance.
>
> Steve

Sandra is a lousy HD benchmark because, like many so-called
"disk benchmarks", it measures performance through the OS
and its filesystem; hence, Sandra is a more of a filesystem
benchmark than a HD benchmark. {I'm not anti-Sandra; I rather
like it for its voluminous reports.}

WinBench has the same problem as Sandra.

I trust HDtach, and only HDtach, to deliver low-level data
which can be compared with the HD vendor's data for a HD.
Even with HDtach, you must carefully run standalone, so that
apps running concurrently with HDtach do not perturb the data
for the HD.
--
Cheers, Bob

[SteveBarnard]

Thanks Bob - I'll definitely try it.

>-----Original Message-----
>SteveBarnard wrote:
>> Athlon XP 1800+ system running at 33Mhz with 1gb of
RAM
>> and an IBM Deskstar 45gb 7200rpm ultra ata HDD. System
>> just not running well - ran SiSoft Sandra and the disk
>> benchmarks are VERY poor. XP-P recognized the drive
from
>> BIOS and installed it's own drivers.
>>
>> I'm looking for some other program to test the
>> speed/throughput/transfer-rate on the drive. Any
>> suggestions? WinBench? Please advise and thank in
advance.
>>
>> Steve
>
>Sandra is a lousy HD benchmark because, like many so-
called
>"disk benchmarks", it measures performance through the OS
>and its filesystem; hence, Sandra is a more of a
filesystem
>benchmark than a HD benchmark. {I'm not anti-Sandra; I
rather
>like it for its voluminous reports.}
>
>WinBench has the same problem as Sandra.
>
>I trust HDtach, and only HDtach, to deliver low-level
data
>which can be compared with the HD vendor's data for a HD.
>Even with HDtach, you must carefully run standalone, so
that
>apps running concurrently with HDtach do not perturb the
data
>for the HD.
>--
>Cheers, Bob
>
>.
>