Poor IDE performance in Win2K

[Angilion]

I recently moved from Win98SE to an evaluation copy of Win2K Pro, to see if I wanted to buy Win2K.

The main problem I have is that my IDE performance is dire. My CD drives are now struggling to eventually reach 5x on long files. If I use a CD player for an audio CD, it takes well over a minute to start playing. Windows CD player states "waiting for drive to become available". Sisoft Sandra 2004 reports overall HDD performance of ~28MB/s. It was 38MB/s under Win98SE. I traced it in more detail...sequential read and write are both 42MB/s, which is as expected. Random read is 9MB/s, random write is 7MB/s.

I did a complete reformat before installing Win2K. I've tried the motherboard drivers that came with the board itself (Abit KV7) and the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers (4.51).

Any ideas?

 

[HammerBot]

Check that DMA is enabled for the drives.

<i><b>Engineering is the fine art of making what you want from things you can get</b></i>

 

[Angilion]

I should have mentioned that I have done that. Primary and secondary IDE channels are set to auto-detect and the current mode used is Ultra DMA for all three drives (HDD on primary, CDROM and CD-RW on secondary - I do very little disc-to-disc copying). Write caching is enabled on the HDD.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Angilion on 01/31/04 06:17 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Villas]

Hi there.

Althoug Win2k has most of the drivers, they're normaly compatibility drivers and don't take the most of the hardware. it's allways important to install the chipset drivers. If You have a VIA based Motherboars, there's the Hyperion 4 in 1 service pack for example. They're normaly in the motherboard CD, but is allways better to get the latest version.
That's normally needed to get the most out of the hardware. The native driver instalation for an IDE controller may allow you to activate/deactivate UDMA mode.

Follow the links according to your chipset:
VIA: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=300
Intel:http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Product_Filter.asp?ProductID=816
For SiS, you must access your Motherboard brand.

Hope to be of some use

Rui Villas
<font color=blue>Linux makes an AMD K/6 350Mhz run like a P4 2.4 Ghz. Why do I have Win2k Pro?? </font color=blue>

 

[Angilion]

Thank you for the thought, but as I said, I have already installed the Hyperion 4-in-1 drivers, both the version on my m/b disk and the latest version (4.51).

However, Windows2K retains the standard Windows drivers even after I install the 4-in-1 drivers. Odd.

The drive is also much noisier than before, except when it's performing large sequential reads or writes (which it does at up to 59MB/s, depending on what part of the platter is being used). Access time shows as 16.3ms, which is slow but not slow enough to explain the drop to 9MB/s on random read and 7MB/s on random write.

 

[CapNjacK]

Did you install the service packs for Win2k? Service Pack 1 for Win2k includes an ide patch. What are your drives? As in 66ata 100ata 133ata?
Can't remember if Win2k did not truly take advantage of 66 or better or 100 and better. Either way you should service pack.

 

[Angilion]

More good suggestions, but unfortunately they don't help. I have SP3 installed (I saw a lot of people complaining that SP4 fubared their system, so I didn't go with it).

My HDD is an 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, so that's ATA133. The CD drives are noname cheapos, but they are either ATA-33 or ATA-66.

Rather bizarrely, doing a full surface scan on my HDD has fixed the speed issues with my *CD drives*. I now get 5.5MB/s with my reader and 6.5MB/s with my writer, which is close enough to the nominal speeds. I still have to wait a minute for CD Player to find an audio CD, though.

I'm beginning to think that my HDD has developed a fault. There are quite a few reports about the 80GB DiamondMax Plus 9 drives showing faults. The full HDD speed measurement I did shows quite a few massive drops in the graph. As far as I know, that indicates bad sectors. The drive is also suddenly *much* noisier on seeking (i.e. random read/write is very noisy, sequential read/write is almost silent).

I'm going to do a complete reformat and reinstall next week - there are some other problems with this installation and it's an evaluation installation anyway - but I am suspecting a fault with the HDD.

 

[CapNjacK]

Well good luck with that. As for SP4 I've never had it fubar a server and I've got it installed in over 60 servers and 2000 workstations. It can be a problem for certain apps and such but hardly ever on a new install most of the problems come about during an upgrade from SP3 to SP4. Most of them are known anyway and there are hotfixes which are available if you do have some issues. If you're just evaluating I would go for SP4.