Slow Hard Drive Speed P4S333-VM

Hi.

The speed of the hard drive with this board (the P4S333-VM without
LAN) is slow.

It seems slow in real life use, so I benchmarked using SiSoft Sandra
2003. For comparison I installed the same version of Sandra on a
different machine (with different board and slower CPU). The speed of
an ATA-66 drive on the other machine was more than twice as fast as
the ATA-100 in this one.

All BIOS options are correct, and the drive is detected as ATA-100.
I installed the latest SiS IDE driver, made no difference.
The CD-ROM and CD-RW are both installed on the secondary IDE port, the
hard drive stands alone on primary.

Any ideas anyone? Thanks in advance.

U320 SCSI !

Albeit, I use U160 SCSI with P4B533-V.

Dave

(Paul) wrote in
:

In article ,
(jonathansmith1962) wrote:

Hi.

The speed of the hard drive with this board (the P4S333-VM without
LAN) is slow.

It seems slow in real life use, so I benchmarked using SiSoft Sandra
2003. For comparison I installed the same version of Sandra on a
different machine (with different board and slower CPU). The speed of
an ATA-66 drive on the other machine was more than twice as fast as
the ATA-100 in this one.

All BIOS options are correct, and the drive is detected as ATA-100.
I installed the latest SiS IDE driver, made no difference.
The CD-ROM and CD-RW are both installed on the secondary IDE port,
the hard drive stands alone on primary.

Any ideas anyone? Thanks in advance.

Using 40 pin connector / 80 wire cable ? That is necessary for
the higher ATA speeds.

Also, check in Windows to see if DMA is enabled or disabled for the
drive. A drive operating in polled transfer mode would seem that slow.

Are you using the graphics built into the motherboard or a separate
AGP graphics card ? If using the built in graphics, the graphics core
steals memory bandwidth to draw the screen or implement textures.

That is about all the influences I can think of, other than your hard
drive having a lot of bad blocks on it.

HTH,
Paul


Hi, and thanks Paul.

Yes, it is the correct cable - indeed BIOS detects as ATA-100. In my
experience it does not do that with a "legacy" cable.

DMA is enabled.

It is the on-board graphics, 32 Mb of the 512 Mb installed. Would that
really make *so much* difference to the HD speed? Remember this is
running at less than half the benchmarked speed of an UDMA-66 drive.

No bad blocks.

Thanks again Paul.

In article ,
" wrote:

(Paul) wrote in
:

In article ,
(jonathansmith1962) wrote:

Hi.

The speed of the hard drive with this board (the P4S333-VM without
LAN) is slow.

It seems slow in real life use, so I benchmarked using SiSoft Sandra
2003. For comparison I installed the same version of Sandra on a
different machine (with different board and slower CPU). The speed of
an ATA-66 drive on the other machine was more than twice as fast as
the ATA-100 in this one.

All BIOS options are correct, and the drive is detected as ATA-100.
I installed the latest SiS IDE driver, made no difference.
The CD-ROM and CD-RW are both installed on the secondary IDE port,
the hard drive stands alone on primary.

Any ideas anyone? Thanks in advance.

Using 40 pin connector / 80 wire cable ? That is necessary for
the higher ATA speeds.

Also, check in Windows to see if DMA is enabled or disabled for the
drive. A drive operating in polled transfer mode would seem that slow.

Are you using the graphics built into the motherboard or a separate
AGP graphics card ? If using the built in graphics, the graphics core
steals memory bandwidth to draw the screen or implement textures.

That is about all the influences I can think of, other than your hard
drive having a lot of bad blocks on it.

HTH,
Paul


Hi, and thanks Paul.

Yes, it is the correct cable - indeed BIOS detects as ATA-100. In my
experience it does not do that with a "legacy" cable.

DMA is enabled.

It is the on-board graphics, 32 Mb of the 512 Mb installed. Would that
really make *so much* difference to the HD speed? Remember this is
running at less than half the benchmarked speed of an UDMA-66 drive.

No bad blocks.

Thanks again Paul.

With regard to the on-board graphics, it would have a tiny influence.
I guess I just hate UMA designs :-)

Well, seeing as Windows thinks that DMA is enabled, are there any
utility programs you can use to verify that DMA is enabled ?

I tried a search on Google, for "P4S333 DMA IDE" and found this:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...-snr2.gtei.net

It is possible that if you install the SIS IDE driver manually, you
will get real bus mastering, in which case you might see the transfer
speed increase. If a chipset doesn't have a bog-standard register set
for an interface like this, you may end up depending on the chipset
manufacturer (SIS) for a driver that works well. Normally the Microsoft
generic IDE driver is all you need.

HTH,
Paul