Logical vs .Physical

[conquistadorst]

Ive beein running benchmarks on my HD and comparing with friends. Under logical becnhmarks all the hardrives are operating comparably to hardware, the same. However when it comes to physical benchmarks my hardrive is absolutely horrible! Friends with ATA100 score around 20x better! I score around 7.2MB/s SERIOUSLY! Although I have only ATA66 the difference shouldnt be that big! What gives!?!?

I have:
WD HD ATA66 7200RPM 2MB cache
FIC SD11
Athlon "classic" 600MHz
128MB PC100 ECC CL3
S3 Viper II
WIN98SE

VS. friends computer

IBM Deskstar 30-some GB ATA100 7200RPM
ASUS A7V
Thunderbird 900MHz
128MB Crucial PC133 CL2
V5 5500 AGP 64MB DDR running on AGP4x
WIN 98SE

Yes im using right cables and drive is operating at 66 b/c i chcked with diagnostics disk that came with the HD.

 

[yoda271828]

Your friend is using an IBM 75GXP, which has a max data transfer rate of 37MB/s. There aren't any other IDE drive out there that can compete with it. That still doesn't explain why your is <b>so</b> slow though. Do you have the latest ATA66 drivers from FIC? Is your HD full. If you're reading from the end of the drive then 7.2MB/s isn't that slow.

 

[Ncogneto]

What controller are you using? onboard? also are you sure you have dma enabled in windows?

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[mpjesse]

If Windows isn't lagging and programs are taking forever to load- i wouldn't worry about it. Also, your buddy has a pretty damn fast CPU compared to a classic Athlon 600... ATA-100 and a 900mhz t-bird could make a BIG difference in benchmarks.

-MP Jesse

 

[Flyboy]

I thought performance increases towards the end of the platter? Much like the speed of a propellar. The outside is travelling faster than the inside, thus wouldn't the performance increase? Just curious (I've said this before to others so I want to get make sure that I'm telling them correctly).

 

[yoda271828]

The <i>outside</i> of the platter is the <i>beginning</i> of the disk and the <i>inside</i> of the platter is the <i>end</i> of the disk. So your right, you just got the beginning and end mixed up.

 

[Kodiak]

So its the reverse of CD-ROMs? (where it begins inside the platter, and ends on the outside of the disk...)

 

[yoda271828]

yup.

Just as a note: I don't know how the disk handles multiple platters though. I'm assuming most drives write to the outsides of <i>all</i> the platters first, not one platter at a time.

 

[Kodiak]

the heads don't move independently, so I can't think of an easy or efficient way in which they'd write to different parts of disk... so I assume if one starts at the outside, they all start at outside