ATA 100 HDD and win2k problems

[zhenkai 0]

A few issues with my ATA 100 HDD and win2k with SP2

 

Via Bus IDE Master does not detect the drive

Under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in device manager there is only

Via BM Ultra DMA channel and

Via Bus Master ATA Controller

 

I thought there was suppose to be 3

 

Poor performance with HD Tach

 

At one stage it was at 22ms seek. 8) but now it's on 13.3 after defrag.

 

Still I was suspecting better performance.

Any ideas what's going on?

[ok_interested 0]

i have noticed that win2ksp2 and xp have horrible ATA100 HD performance compared to win98se and me

 

i have tested using two of the exact same types of hd on my system ,(the only diferent variables was the OS installed, and yes i had UDMA on in the device manager) one HD with win2ksp2 fresh install, anotherHD with 98se fresh install, and ran hd tach and sandra hd bench.

 

and also performed unraring tests of several large 600+mb archives

 

what i found was that in win98se it ran about twice as fast. Unraring took 3 times longer on win2ksp2 then it did in win98se, where win98se took only 1 min it would take 3+min in win2ksp2

 

i then tried this with winxp vs me and same results only it was more like a 2x slower in unraring then in me and results were a lil closer but still disapointing. and still below 98se which i found to have the best HD performance of all the OS's

 

this is just so dissapointing. since win2ksp2 seems to be much more stable and overall better in all other categories.

 

now it could be that the Ali IDE drivers built into win2k and xp are to blame. so i also tried installing the ones on their site ( even though they recommend sticking to the default ones) and yet this did not help one bit.

 

anyone know what can be done to even this out so that win2ksp2 and xp show 98se hd performance? Note i had sp2 and devicemanagers UDMA is turned on.. so the above recommendation dosent apply. so any other ideas?

[ok_interested 0]

humm looks like i forgot to mention that i did the tests with both operating systems using fat32, in order to keep them simmilar.

 

then i tried fat32 vs ntfs. and still no performance increase, actually more like you said, probably even more of a decrease.

 

the thing that bothers me the most is that compared to 98se/me it takes 3 times longer in 2k and xp to unrar things, and i do alot of unraring. if there was a fix for this alone i would be happy.

[ok_interested 0]

Well guess what.. i think its just these IBM Deskstar drives that act strange in win2k making them slow.

 

because i just bought a new WesternDigital 100GB caviar drive and it runs like it should in win2k. in that it runs just as good if not better in win2k then my IBM drive in win98se/me.

 

this new WD drive is lightning fast in comparison. i havent tried this new WD drive in 98orME, wonder if it even runs faster? unfortunatly im going to leave that a mystery for now since i dont have time to reinstal an os on it as im busy with a networking upgrade.but for now the speed i get from it is quite acceptable..

 

who would have guessed that these supposidly better IBM drives were flawed in this way? wonder if that is the case, or maby its just win2 and the ali ide driver, who knows? , all i know is that this WD runs fine, while IBM runs slow, and both are same specs,, actually IBM being roughly half the size i would have expected it to be faster.

[packman 0]

Sorry to jump in here when so much discussion has already taken place but it's fairly common knowledge that Win2k doesn't by itself support ATA100 operation. You need to add Service Pack 2 immediately after installing Win2K, as the fix for it is on that.This you've done, it seems.

 

Some manufacturers of hard drives require an additional utility to be downloaded and run, in order to set up the hard drive for the UDMA or ATA performance you require. The default for a given HDD might not be ATA100, it might be UDMA66. Perhaps you should make some enquiries with the manufacturer of your hard drive? Perhaps you THINK you're running at ATA100 but in reality you're simply running at UDMA66.

 

I presume you're aware also that there are different versions of SP2 around. Apparently, only the version for networked PCs actually fully works. The Express and third-party CD versions of SP2 do not properly update some drivers in Win2K. If you're unlucky, like I've been, you can end up with the cache write-back problem through this. Microsoft acknowledge that this is an issue in Win2K but they don't have a fix for it that's openly available. We'll all have to wait for SP3.

[ok_interested 0]

wow been awhile since ive had time to come here to this forum.. anywell i dont even own that old IBM HD.. i had it replaced with a newer 120GXP drive, which i now use as backup, and use my WD as primary..

 

all the information you mentioned i was already aware of..but thanks for posting as others who may read this may not know this information.

 

Anywell both My HD are running perfectly fine in winxp pro in ata100.