Same Hard Drive, Different performance

ok ok ok im gonna ask this to the world now and will assume it is the cause of all the problems..
ok you have 2 hard drives Maxtor 6Y080L0 7200 RPM ATA100
1 is in my AMD Socket A 1800 Mhz Athlon XP based system on a Soltek KT600-C1L with Via North/South Bridge

The other is on a Socket 478 Pentium 4 Celeron 2400 Mhz system on a P4M266A-8235 Mobo with Via North/South Bridge

So my brain teaser is this, why is there a BIG performance difference between the 2?
My AMD system HD is fast, furious and you could eat your dinner off it

My Mates INTEL(ectually challenged) system is performing like a snail with a heavy bag of shopping and i mean SLOW, Defrag takes upto 10 times longer, File access is SLOW, File transfer between partitions is SLOW, Installing games is SLOW in fact anything to do with the HD is SLOW id say about Half the speed at which mine does stuff. If i Write a big file to my HD the LED sort of flickers and pulses. if HIS HD writes the same file the LED is on CONTINUOUS and you get the typical Hour Glass (wait while i finish me coffee first) kind of thing.
Please help if you can i want names, dates, places lol ANY help, ANY suggestions, just ANYTHING at all i can do to either correct this or just understand why the performance is so different, you ask me for a spec, il answer it, its really bugging me and i know its nothing to do with viri or spyware as like i have said his pc has never been on the internet except for windows update through my modem and driver updates through my modem, with full firewall activated and antivrus running. the darn thing is sat behind me and the only time its connected to my pc is through network LAN100 to transfer files when mine ISNT connected to the net, and I dont have viri or spyware or any other nasties on my pc im very vigilant that way.
There is one last program i am going to try and that is ACTIVE SMART to get some details about whats happening. and il compare my results with his.

Are there any other HardDrive Benchmarking programs i could try ????

Thanks again.

 

See attached Active smart info for both pc`s, they show nothing wrong

 

Also does your friend have alot more stuff on his comp than you?this will explain the defrag time and also the read/write time as a harddrive gets slower the more you have on it,try checking and unchecking DMA"direct memory access" in bios,what kind of ram do you both have also and what size?

 

thankyou i will try that

 

he has a lot LESS on his HD than me, i have tons of apps and the old favorite amiga emulator (i own a A1200, so i got the rom file from my own machine lol)
and both versions of C&C Generals

my ram is non registered 2x512Mb DDR 400 Mhz running (because of my AMD2200XP 1800Mhz 133FSB) at 266Mhz

his ram is non registered 2x256Mb DDR 400 running at 400Mhz (cos of his P4 2400Mhz Celeron)

I know theres half a gig difference in ram but SURELY it cant be that, how could that effect HD performance? oh ps my Page File is always around 120MB in use where as his is only 90Mb in use under normal "at boot" status
thats why i just cant understand the strange fact that his whole system is much slower/less responsive than mine all because his HD is lagging
I will try the DMA thing its Active on both machines, mine and his.
I cant try more ram on his machine without taking it out of my system, and i dont want to hurt my system *strokes case* LMAO

 

i just had an idea ... 32Bit transfer mode is enabled for both HD's in bios do you think it could be hating life on his system ?
there is also LBA Mode and Black Mode under HD options in my bios (what the hell is Black mode when its at home? the manual for the mobo doesnt tell you what it does, just that you can enable it . if i enabled it on my system does that mean my HD would start to worship the devil ? )

 

here is his bios settings for the IDE side of things
in device manager "write caching" is enabled on his drive, would that make a difference?

 

Now that is EXTREMELY interesting!, My C: drive was reading data at around 57MB/s I just ran exactly the same test on his pc and his C: is reading around 3072KB/s (3.072MB/s) and his mouse pointer jittering around like no ones business. that really is ridiculously SLOW,
i could understand it if there was a virus scanner on there but this was straight from booting his pc up and waiting for the drive to finish activity.
and to rub dirt into it even further i ran my test while i was on the net, msn running, AND listening to creative media source player jamming my tunes down my headphones and i suffer absolutley no performance loss whatsoever, so what is going on here??????
My HD light is hardly ever on, his is flickering every 0.7 seconds like its doing a task or something ?? iv checked task manager and he has nothing running that i dont have (in fact i have more tasks running)
one pic is task manager at side of HD Speed, the other is a nifty utility called FileMon which shows you all the reading and writing that is going off on your HD, and according to file mon his hd isnt doing much at all, just the sundry explorer.exe updating drive info occasionally and a large spurt of activity when i ran filemon (like windows opening drivers, checking folder, and prefetch writing the file for later access) you may need to copy the images and then zoom in a lil to read the screen sorry i cant make it any better.
on my studies i can eliminte a few things
1)its not a virus
2)its not a task or application
3)its not windows being dodgy
4) his drive is healthy
5) something in between the HD Hardware and Windows OS is stopping this drive from reading and writing at its optimal speeds and we all know the only thing between Hardware and an OS is ... The Bios, so i guess i should probe deeper into this. Thanks for that utility it was the key to discovering this!
Please keep suggestions Rolling in.... this is a proper puzzler !!

 

oh and sorry yeah the HD shares IDE0 with his DVD Rom that was part of his pc when he bought it set as HD Master, DVD Slave on Primary (there is no disk in the drive)

 

That could be what's dragging down the performance of his hard drive. Both drives on a single IDE channel will usually operate at the speed of the slower one. And an optical drive can't use an interface faster than ATA33, so they generally don't have anything faster and need only a 40-conductor IDE cable. Your hard drive can do much better than that, and will need an 80-conductor cable to get its best performance.

If you want to compare performance of the two hard drives in the two systems, make sure that any other IDE devices are in comparable positions on their respective IDE channels. Better yet -- disconnect other IDE devices for the duration of the comparison test.

If you're moving or copying a lot of material between the hard drive and the optical drive, put them on different IDE channels. That way, one can be reading while the other is writing. That can't happen if they're both on the same channel. An IDE controller can't read and write on the same channel at the same time.

 

but my hard drive and his are both using 80lead cables
mine is a rounded IDE cable for cooling purposes and his is a standard new lead which i took out of my system when i bought the rounded ones.
His new DVD it was brand new bought in last 2 weeks) and the specs out do mine, both DVD +R+W-R-W his has faster write capabilities than mine and shares the IDE0 like mine does. i will disconnect it and run the test again but i cant see what difference it will make to the HD when there is no disk in the DVDs as they arnt doing anything, but thanks i will try it when i get home from work later today

 

Ok the drives are reconfigured, see POST, all drives using 80wire Lead, and the performance is STILL 3079Kb/s Read on his HD, whats wrong with it ?

 

I found the problem!
Its working swimmingly again now back at UDMA Mode 6 like it should be !
for some reason, windows downgraded the Primary IDE channel back to PIO mode, i had to uninstall the IDE Primary channel in device manager and let windows re install it. apparently windows will do this if it encounters CRC errors, downgrading the UDMA mode by 1 everytime it happens! i found the answer in this article
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm
Thanks for everyone that tried, we can all learne something new everyday cant we thanks again xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

yeh but it was LAST thing i would have thought of lol , i had no idea about that stuff, lol so my brother was right in a sense it sounded like an IDE controller lol Thanks y'all