Improving HD Performance

[nixon]

I just ran a test on PcPitstop.com, and got the following results about my HDs:

Drive C has a cached speed of 109.41 megabytes per second.

Drive C has an uncached speed of 0.55 megabytes per second.

For comparison, systems with the same CPU, clock speed, and memory size as this one have an average cached speed of 222 MB/s and an uncached speed of 4.47 MB/s


Which is shockingly bad, considering the HD isn't a bad brand, and is not even two years old.

One of their suggestions, is this: Make sure DMA is enabled on all disk drives. Not using DMA mode can cause a significant reduction in uncached disk speed. For more information on how to enable DMA, see these links for Windows XP (links open in a new window):
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/storage/IDE-DMA.asp

I checked out the site, now I don't know what this "PIO only" and "DMA if Available" does to your overall performance?


Otherwise, what can I do to improve this sucky performance? Any tips? Or is this what to expect when you're running with the NTFS file system?

 

[nixon]

I took this screenshot of how it looks:

 

[Centrifuge]

Usually DMA (Direct memory access) will be set as a default. If it isn't enabled, the computer will apparently run very sluggish. I'm not sure what PIO stands for, I just know that from what I've read I don't want my computer running in that mode .

What are the specs on your hard drives? RPM, cache etc. ?

 

[sw99]

I did the pc pitstop test about 3 days ago after doing a reformat and fresh install (after 2 years of using fat32 file system converted from an old windows ME installation) and my hard drive speed was also a crappy 47% of normal hard drive speed... no idea whats causing it, but i don't really have any complaints... it just bugs me that it's the only thing that's supposedly wrong with my PC that hasn't been fixable... as far as i know anyway.

Edit: It was the same deal before the reformat/file system change, so don't assume it's an NTFS thing.