I bought a new motherboard and CPU combination the other day, and plugged everything in. It worked (eventually). I decided to check and make sure everything was running. Sure enough, the new CPU seemed to be working. Everything was fine, apart from the hard drive, a Maxtor 6Y060L0.
I benchmarked the hard drive, and it came out at around 20,000 kb/s. This was roughly equivalent to an ATA 100 5,400 rpm model, apparently. The only thing about that is that it's a 7,200 rpm ATA 133 model. The motherboard is capable of running ATA 133, the hard drive is capable of running ATA 133, I bought an ATA 133 cable. I have DMA turned on in the BIOS, and according to Windows XP, it's running on Ultra DMA Mode 5.
Why isn't it faster? Why? For the love of god, why?
Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :
Did you plug it in?
Posted by Grokca (Member # 722) on :
Perhaps it's running on the wrong side of the bus.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I have no idea what that means. It's in IDE socket 0 on the motherboard (the one the manual told me to plug it in to), and it's configured as the master and all that.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
Hmm, what motherboard and what are you using to benchmark the drive? Are you comparing read performance or burst performance?
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
The motherboard is an ASRock K7VT2, with a 2400+ Athalon and 256 of DDR memory.
I used S.A.N.D.R.A. to benchmark the drive. Is there any ither software you'd recommend? I tried using the Powermax utility that's on the Maxtor web-site, but that couldn't even find the drive.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
Hmmmmm, I tried the same thing with a Matrox 6L060J3 (a 60GB drive, also with ATA 133) and I'm getting pretty much the same results, 21 MB/s with Windows cache, 20MB/s without. My guess is that the projections they use are overly optimistic. Also on their help page,
quote: Q: My drive/RAID array is in ATA133 mode but gets no better performance than ATA100 mode! A: Most PCI33 interfaces are limited to ~90MB/s due to bus contention and overheads. PCI 64-bit/66MHz/X adapters are recommended to get the best of the ATA interface.