Abyssmal HD performance? ...or not?

[Vermil]

AMD system. 8 GB ram. Stock clocks everywhere. Vista 64 Premium. SB750 Southbridge. WD Green Power 500GB on AHCI, MS Vista drivers (these are supposed to be better than AMD's own).
Vista Experience score on HD = 5.7
Though the 5.7 is my lowest Vista score, it never really worried me as it doesn't look like anything might be wrong.

Now onwards to PCMark05 basic:
HDD - XP startup: 7.69 MB/s (WTF! ?)
HDD - general usage 5.69 MB/s (WTF! ?)
HDD - virus scan 60.85 MB/s (hmm.. ? still seems low.)

So anyone have any clue what gives? What should my Vista experience HD score be like?
Could it be that this is some issue with the old PCMark05 benchmark itself? Like that it doesn't operate correctly with Vista 64, Green Power technology or AHCI?

My experience of the system is ok, I guess. I've never taken special notice of any slow HD performance.

 

[topper743]

Download and run HD Tune and tell us what you get. What does the WD say the specs shouls be?

 

[Vermil]

Thankyou. I got HDTune and ran it. Everything seem Okayish.

Min= 39.0 MB/s
Max= 80.2 MB/s
Average= 61.7 MB/s
access time 15.0 ms
Burst rate = 105.1 MB/s

cpu usage 6.2 %


So it seems I can blame PCMark05 for not working correctly then, and there should be nothing seriously wrong.

According to Toms Hardware charts, the average transfer rate should be 62.1 MB/s for this particular drive so it seem to fit well with my 61.7 MB/s

 

[sminlal]

HDD - XP startup: 7.69 MB/s (WTF! ?)

I'm not familiar with PCMark 05, but I'm guessing that this metric is simulating the kind of disk I/O that takes place when XP starts. That would be a lot of very small, random I/Os, and a figure like this would be fairly typical for that kind of I/O load. You may be able to get 60 or 70MB/sec when you do continuous reads from contiguous sectors on the disk, but when XP starts the access arm is madly seeking back and forth as fast as it can to read a myriad of small EXE, DLL and data files - that's why the I/O rate is much lower.

This is the kind of thing where an SSD really shines because it doesn't have any mechanical delays that slow down random I/O operations.