That's the question. HDDs are the slowest parts in my PC (after optical drives), so I (and probably many other people) would like to improve the performance of hard drives. But how to? Maybe using higher UDMA level? At the moment I'm using level 5 (100MB/s) but I should be able to use level 6 at least on my samsung. How about maxtors or seagates drives? And what other means of increasing hdd's performance you can imagine?
a few questons 1 what is the hdd sata or ide (sata running at 150mbps and ide at 100mbps to 130mbps) and then we need to know (if ide) what speed the hdd is (model number and brand will be sufficent to find out.
3 HDDs: IDE0 Master: Seagate ST380021A, 80Gt ATA, now using UDMA5 100MB/s IDE0 Slave: Samsung SP2014N, 200Gt ATA, now using UDMA6 133MB/s IDE1 Master: Maxtor 6Y200P0, 200Gt ATA, now using UDMA6 133MB/s IDE1 Slave: LG GSA-4120B dvd+-r(w), now using UDMA2 33MB/s(?) All HDD:s are 7200rpm, Seagate probably won't run using UDMA6. But is there any other way of boosting hdd-performance?
using ata 100/133 ide cables. replace exiting hds with 10-15,000 rpm drives whether ide or scsi. also depends on motherboard speed
At the moment I'm not going to buy new hdds. And besides, I need big disks, so scsi won't do the job. 10-15krpm are quite noisy, aren't they? So is there a way of increasing the speed of the disks that already exist?
OMG whats the difference between SATA 150 MB/s, IDE 133 MB/s or even 100 MB/s when current hdd's average transfers goes not even close to 50 MB/s.... oh yeah its one pro for SATA - its one thin cable for one drive and you can plugin drives with comp running (not sure about this, they said it would be possible but i haven't tried yet). IDE cable is almost always used by two drives (remember to not connecting fast drive and cdrom on one cable), and its wide and thats can disturb air flow.
Yep, I get speeds 41.3MB/s (seagate), 56.8MB/s(samsung) and 57.0MB/s (maxtor) and corresponding burstspeeds are 71.0MB/s, 91.7MB/s and 104.2MB/s. Too bad.
yeah thats as fast as ur seagate running at 100mb/s is gona run and replacing the ide cables wont do anythink either.
i agree with zgyfrd, none of your hard drives come close to maxing out the available bandwidth To speed it up get 2 SATA2 15,000rpm 36gb drives and raid 0 them, thats as fast as you can get
Well, as I said, I'm not going to buy new hdds for a while. And I also said that using such small disks wouldn't work, I need big hdds and if possible, quiet ones. My 480GB is runnning out of space any time...
the point i was making was that your hard drive speed was highly unlikely to be "slowing" your computer
Perhaps not slowing, I'd still like them to work faster. Another problem, what do I have to do to make Samsung SP0802N (80GB, ata) work in UDMA5 or UDMA6 mode? Motherboard is MSI K7T266 Pro 2 RU and I'm using WinXP. Windows says it's using UDMA2 with that disk, and it seems to be so too (slow).
how many samsungs do you have as you only posted this 1 IDE0 Slave: Samsung SP2014N, 200Gt ATA, now using UDMA6 133MB/s
I do not see how the HD can be slowing your system. The software installed is the problem. Do you de-frag & do all the other things that you should to keep your PC running sweet? I guess that you have XP as your OS? How much mem have you got? I have XP Smoker on my PC. Nice bit of kit that fine tunes XP to make it run faster. (I have noticed marked difference in speed) XP is an absolute whore when it comes to using your valuable resources. I really think that you are going about this the wrong way. My 10,000 rpm Raptor HD does improve loading times, but I think that you have to sort out your resources first. Pulsar Link for XP smoker, if you are interested http://www.xp-smoker.com/
ddp, that was about another PC, problem solved already. And pulsar, yes, I'm running WinXP, 1024MB 400MHz DDR should be enough, don't you think? And yes, I do defrag hdds periodically, also run Ad-Aware and Spybot to get rid of possible malware and Norton IS keeps viruses out of question. Maybe I should try that XP Smoker... And to make it clear, I don't think that my PC is slow, I just wanted it to be faster. (Overclocking is a possibility, I know, but there are first some other issues to deal with.)
