Hard drive benchmarking

drtanz

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Hi I was just satisfying my curiosity and trying out some benchmarking on my drives using HD Tune 2.55, and I'm interested as to why my USB external drives and one sata drive perform at around 30-40MB per second transfer, while my SATA drive on which the OS resides only performs at around 3mb/sec transfer? Is this normal or is there some problem with the drive, given the considerable difference in data transfer speed? thanks
 

drtanz

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I left the test going without anything running in the background, here is the screenshot
ybl6a8n
 

sub mesa

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Yeah that's probably a PIO issue. Go to the Device Manager and delete the controller serving that drive. Reboot and it should be found again, this time without using PIO.

PIO is a fail-safe mechanism when a problem occured. This may be nothing to wory about and just reset itself, it may also be a problem with cable connection or otherwise. The bad thing is, Windows offers no warning message when this happens, like a flashing balloon they use so often to remind their customers to activate their product. :)
 

drtanz

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undergoing a defrag right now, but shouldnt be too defragmented as its set on autodefrag when it detects fragmentation problems
 

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How many reallocted sectors drtanz? Because this is an age variable. A few won't matter but if you have hundreds of bad relocated sectors and more adding daily it indeed would be consistent with a failed drive.

Though i want to point out the slowness of the drive is caused by it running in PIO mode. It may run in PIO mode because it timeouts the requests its been given, though, so the ultimate curlpit may indeed be the disk dying. Either way i'd still would try to fix it. If the PIO issue is gone you should run the benchmark again and post it here. The slowness should be gone in that case.
 

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Oh and defragmenting has no effect at all. HDTune tests the raw surface; filesystem fragmentation will not affect these scores. So if HDTune gives a low raw read, your drive is not functioning properly.
 

drtanz

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hmm yeah the tests are pretty much identical now to what i posted earlier. as regards to PIO I dont know what exactly it is, what i did was go into device manager and uninstall the disk, then restarted the pc and it found the drive again and installed it. was that what i had to do or something else?
 

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Look at the RAW value, these numbers are threshold values: 0 means your drive is virtually dead - 255 means perfect. Some values are meant to be lower than 255. If you look at the raw value you'll see "3" for example. This is the actual number of reallocated sectors - aka bad sectors that have been replaced by reserve sectors.
 

drtanz

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ok got those from hd tune, where can i get the RAW value?

also was the uninstall procedure in device manager correct or should i have done something else? thanks
 

drtanz

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actually i just realised that i might have done the uninstall procedure, so this time went into device manager and installed the sata controllers, did a restart but im seeing no improvements in the benchmarking results
 

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Are you sure you removed the right controller? Can you post a screenshot of the device manager with the properties of the controller you think is serving your drive?

It should have a Details tab with information about the SUPPORTED transfer mode (DMA) and the ACTUAL or CURRENT transfer mode, which i suspect is PIO.

In general, posting as much information, such as raw SMART info, will help you get more definite answers here. I'm a linux user so can't help you as much as i would like with windows specific issues, but there should be many free SMART monitoring applications for windows. If not you can always download an Ubuntu Linux cd, boot from it without installing anything, and use utilities available on the command line to test your drive.

A surface check can be done with the dd command:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1M
This command will read from the device /dev/hda and write to the device /dev/null (nothing; so the data goes nowhere). You should change /dev/hda to the name of your harddrive, which can also be /dev/sda for example. This procedure is safe if you don't make any spelling errors in the command. So it won't destroy any data its just a read test. It won't output anything until its finished or encounters a read error.

To do a SMART poll, the following command can be used:
smartctl -a /dev/hda

This will also give you the raw SMART values i requested. After this just reboot your system and take the cd out of the drive, and you boot to Windows again.
 

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c00163484.jpg


This is the controller properties screen i talked about. Here you can see if it is *actually* using DMA mode or if it is using PIO mode. The screen may be different for SATA controllers though, i can't tell.
 

drtanz

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ok here are some screenshots from what ive been up to, showing the device manager stuff i was messing around with (unfortunately couldnt find the place where it says pio), and also the new benchmarking test, after i uninstalled the sata controller i did a restart as described earlier but nothing changed, then did another restart and got some better results, now the drive is reaching higher speeds but also fluctuating heavily as you can see

screen1.png

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drtanz

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another screenshot of benchmarking, this time without me doing other things on the pc. I was preparing the screenshots when doin the previous test :)

screen6.png