Main HDD too slow

hi. I've been trying for a while to improve system performance and a check on pc pitstop has my primary hdd at 39% uncached speed. my secondary drive is at 100%. There is no fragmented space in the drive, so do i need to buy a new one or does anyone know how this can be improved?

 

It might help greatly if we had some information about the hard drives involved, and what their specs are.

Without that info, we're just guessing. But if you really want a half-assed guess: no, you don't need to buy a new drive.

There you are. You've got an answer to your question. Would you trust it? I wouldn't.

 

The secondary is a 300Gb maxtor with 16Mb cache, the primary is a maxtor 80Gb with a 2Mb cache. both run at 7200 rpm and are defragged with 25Gb free on the primary and about 40Gb free on the secondary. Would the 300Gb serve as a good master?

 

I think it might be 8mb cache on the small drive. My 300Gb disc hovers around 100% of the average, and both are the same age.

 

Check Maxtor's site for the drives' performance specs. Use the faster as your master.

Reason: when one drive is slaved to the other, the master drive provides the controller. The slave drive shuts down its controller. You want to use the faster controller if possible. However, the faster drive may be limited by the slower drive's response at times.

One exception: if you are transferring data between the drives with any frequency, put them on separate IDE channels.

Reason: on a single IDE channel, the controller cannot both read and write at the same time. It must complete one operation before it can begin the other. With the drives on separate channels, one drive can be reading while the other is writing because they will have separate controllers.

 

Thanks to both of you, I love this site when the right people answer. with the exception of the cache size, the two drives have identical specs. if i had them on seperate channels, would any other aspects of performance change? and would the dvd drive perform as well if it was a slave?

 

You mean the two hard drives have identical transfer rates and access times? Identical RPMs doesn't guarantee that. But I'll assume that you checked the performance figures as well as the physical specs. I haven't, because I don't know what model nos. are involved.

I can't see any reason why your DVD performance would be affected by configuring it as slave rather than master. It's likely to be much slower than your hard drive, so it's likely to be the bottleneck on that channel regardless of how it's configured. But I don't think you want to be using the DVD's controller when you're accessing the hard drive, so set the HDD as master unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

To rephrase my earlier post: given two IDE drives on the same channel, you want to use the one with the better controller as master because it is controlling both drives on that channel. Transfer rate is one of the better indicators of the ability of the controller.

 

thanks a lot rob, you've been a big help. I checked the full drive specs, and both have 9ms seek times and 133 Mb per sec (if memory serves) data trensfer rate. I'm going to try them on seperate channels. i hope it sorts the problem.

 

Glad to have been able to help.

A thought. I've also heard it said that an optical drive slaved to a hard drive can drag down the performance of a hard drive. I don't know if the statement is true, but it might be worth running your tests with your two hard drives on different IDE channels and your optical drive disconnected.

You can always re-connect the optical drive after you've finished the tests.

If you do that, let us know the results. Better yet would be two sets of results: with the optical drive connected, then disconnected.

 

I've tried the two drives on seperate channels, and the performance with the dvd drive as a slave to the primary hd or disconnected is the same. even when i disconnect everything bar the main drive, that's as good as it gets. Still only 45% of what it should be (but that's an improvement).

I think the best bet is to finish backing up my C drive and shifting the OS onto the big one. I was wondering if there are any options to put the OS onto a small (512Mb) storage device via USB 2.0 and run it off that. SD maybe? Sorry if that's a stupid suggestion, but I know that relying on a hard disk slows up the potential of the system and i do have an SD drive that i could use.

 

I've heard the same, and I've no reason to doubt it.

However, petemate's two drives seem to be identical in all important respects other than size, so I'm not sure that we've found the answer to his question yet.

 

It's a good question.

However, unless your BIOS has boot capabilities that I haven't heard about yet, you're not likely to be able to boot from a USB storage device.

That being the case, you won't have to worry about whether 512MB is large enough to carry your OS. If it's Win98 or a later version of Windows, I think you'll find yourself short of space -- especially if you try to put the swapfile in that space. My Windows folder is over 700MB in size -- after deducting the 750MB currently used by the swapfile that's located in that folder. The total space occupied by my Windows folder is 1.4GB.

 

Ah well, just an idea. bios did include it when i was choosing a drive for the OS initially, but my mobo's no great shakes and i doubt it does anything extraordinary. Cheers anyway mate. I've just bought a few packs of DVD's and I'm going through the painful task of emptying my computer. I think that'll sort things when I've got the big one as a master. I know it's not ideal, but the other one's clearly faulty, so until i can sort it, it's better off being used as a slave.

 

ah... reinstalled the OS on my C drive and i now have 114% performance! I'm guessing there was software on there that was causing the problem. Anyone with a similar issue should try that if all else fails.

 

hmmm, maybe shouldve checked for spyware/viruses.

 

i ran netstat and there were no connections after shutting everything down. I use spyware doctor and avast and they found nothing. I've switched to AVG on the new install btw. anyone know if it's better than avast or should i go back?

 

agreed it seems to bother me less with what it's doing. the update notification used to freeze my system periodically as well so I'll stick with this.

Is there a reason (while i'm still in bitching mode) that one brand of 8x +r discs write fine at that speed, and six or seven others I've tried don't? even the minus version from the same company. I know the rule is that some work and some don't, i just don't get why. My drive is meant to be 8x on + and - but that's life i guess.