That's it, I don't like computers anymore!
Wednesday, January 30, 2002 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk
I'm at the office with my mega system. My dual P4-1.7Ghz machine, 21 inch monitor, IBM DeskStart Ultra ATA 100 hard drive, Geforce 3.
But something hasn't felt right. It feels too slow. My home machine always feels faster for some reason.
I check...
And I check...
CPU benchmark - excellent, it's fast!
Video benchmar - OH yea baby!
Hard drive benchmark...
Going...
Going...
Hmmm. This can't be right...
3.5 MB/s?
Wait, that's slower than a 40 speed CD ROM drive.
What do other computers get...
20 MB/s?!
What?
How can this be?
What does my pathetic laptop at home get? 8 MB/s?! What about my $800 Dell machine at home... 18 MB/s?
Crap! Why? WHY?!
I hate computers.
Typewriters my friends. Typewriters are coming back. Mark my words. They will come back and this fad we call computers will blow away like yesterday's newspaper.
GRRRR! Stupid computer!
Reply #22 Thursday, January 31, 2002 8:10 AM
Reply #23 Thursday, January 31, 2002 8:34 AM
sequential read: 3.5
sequential write: 2.7
random seek: 1.5
disk mark 20.1
Seems awfully similar to your stats. Mind you, this is an old p350/NTFS though. Proves my prejudice that NTFS is overrated. I wonder how well my p75 will score...
Reply #24 Thursday, January 31, 2002 11:04 AM
Reply #25 Friday, February 1, 2002 3:40 PM
Reply #26 Friday, February 1, 2002 4:56 PM
sequential read: 10.9
sequential write: 5.8
random seek: 2.9
disk mark 51.6

Reply #27 Friday, February 1, 2002 4:58 PM
Reply #28 Friday, February 1, 2002 8:43 PM

Reply #29 Friday, February 1, 2002 9:08 PM
But in the meantime...
I got the following pieces of hardware in today to test out.
A Cheetah 10k RPM SCSI drive
Adaptec 19260 (I think) SCSI controller connected to a 64bit PCI slot.
A promise Ultra100 (Ultra ATA/100) controller
A WD Caviar.
Here's where I'm at:
I have installed the Cheetah onto the Adaptec. Took awhile in setup (SCSI can be such a pain in the rear with the # of cables - foolishly purchased from buy.com who sent just the drive, no cables, and it took awhile to get the whole termination thing right). Anyway, up and running and benchmarked at 35 MB/s (a 10X performance improvement over the Deskstar on the onboard controller).
Then I hooked up the Promise controller to the Deskstar and rebenched it. Performance is still poor on the one NTFS partition but it went up to about a 5.5 (from 3.5). The other partition tested much better though at 14.6 (from around 5.5 previously). The difference in the partitions is that one partition has clusters of 512 bytes, the other is 4K. The 512byte clusters (which occur when you use the convert command) are a huge performance hit. But still, 14.6 MB/s is pretty unacceptable as well which implies that the Deskstar, at least here, is not performing as well as it should.
I'll be trying out the Caviar soon.
Reply #30 Saturday, February 2, 2002 12:11 AM
Just a note, on the WD drive, if its going to be the only drive on that channel, the jumper setting is NO jumpers on it, that had me going in circles for two days.
I've never benchmarked it, looking forward to see your outcome.
Reply #31 Saturday, February 2, 2002 4:28 AM

Reply #32 Saturday, February 2, 2002 8:52 AM

C drive....16 gig Fat32 ATA33
sequential read: 13.7
sequential write:11.2
random seek: 4.0
disk mark 76.4
D drive....10 gig NTFS ATA33
sequential read: 14.5
sequential write:11.0
random seek: 3.9
disk mark 77.6
And...
H drive....40 gig NTFS ATA 66 [Promise IDE expansion card]
sequential read: 22.9
sequential write:15.2
random seek: 5.6
disk mark 115.4
Not too bad....P111/500 slot1 1gig PC133 ram [running at 100] Abit BX6 MoBo....

Reply #33 Saturday, February 2, 2002 3:55 PM
Asus P3B-F mobo, PIII/700 slot1, 576mb PC133 ram (running at 100), Promise Ultra ATA100 controller with two channels, Drive C MASTER WD Caviar 40gb ATA100 7200rpm, Drive D SLAVE Quantum 12gb ATA33 5400rpm, Drive E MASTER WD Caviar 20gb ATA100 7200rpm, Drive F SLAVE Quantum 6gb ATA33 5400rpm,
Drive G on the mobo sec IDE channel Plextor 8/4/32A Writer Master, Drive H SLAVE AOpen DVD drive slot feed.
Well there it is, as of now.
Reply #34 Saturday, February 2, 2002 7:39 PM
Try seeing if theres an Intel Inf Utility that works under XP as well
Reply #35 Sunday, February 3, 2002 9:15 AM
sequential read: 2.4 M/s
sequential write: 2.4 M/s
random seek/RW: 1.0 M/s
Disk mark: 15.4
That's an old Seagate UDMA66 on this six year old p75.
Reply #37 Monday, February 4, 2002 12:51 PM

Reply #39 Monday, February 4, 2002 5:48 PM
maybe the macosx. Two years ago, when my MagnetoOptic was crashed, also crashed the Hard Disk!!!!!! 6 months of work at trash scan!!!!!! porca miseriaReply #40 Monday, February 4, 2002 10:14 PM
Please login to comment and/or vote for this skin.
Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
- Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums and downloading skins.
- Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
- Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
- It's simple, and FREE!








Reply #21 Wednesday, January 30, 2002 11:45 PM
Just an idea.