It's those evil P4's. Yuck!

Have you checked for a bios update?

make sure they didn't stick a CD-ROM on the same channel as your hard drive... That'd slow it down real good...

There's a thought... maybe you have an ATA card that needs a driver installed before the OS goes on...

Damn BoXXi... I thought I had it bad

You stole my computer Boxxi!

PII 233
160Mb ram
4gig hard drive
Matrox mystique video card
A 56k modem that will only connect to my ISP at 33k
It does have a nice 17 inch trinitron monitor.

It is the "second" computer. Although the "first" computer is not much better.

Here's the link the the benchmark program I used.

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10102-100-7820342.html?tag=st.dl.10001-103-1.lst-7-2.7820342

Well you saw what I get on seq read: 3.5.

You using FAT or NTFS?

erm..
my laptop
pentium with win 95....and 64mb of ram.....

DavidK,

oh so true. Don't you wish they'll quit putting in bloated programs idiots use? Sometimes my laptop makes me feel stupid =/

Here's where I'm at:

On various disk benchmarks I get around 3 to 5 Megs per second (depending on the benchmark) on this machine. Luckily, there are lots of machines in the test lab to compare to and they all get normal amounts (14 to 22 megs/sec depending on various circumstnaces).

The C drive has 512 byte clusters which is bad but there is no way to fix that because I can't convert to FAT32 because files are compressed and some of them are in use (and you can't run compact in the emergency command console thingy). So that's a minor part of the problem but not the major part.

My other partition, also NTFS, also gets a terrible score (3 to 5) and it has the standard 4K cluster size.

I've put in a couple of different drives and a different controller and one drive with FAT32 managed to get all the way up to a 6. Still a far cry from the 20 to 25 it should be getting.

I've updated the bios to the latest (new as of this month even). Updated the motherboard chipset (Intel 860) to the latest version. Double checked to make sure the features on the drive and such are all set up.

I even switched to a single processor kernal (disabled one of my CPUs) and that made no difference either.

So I'm sitting here with my fast Dell Precision 530 workstation that is fast in every way except that the hard drive performance is very slow.

The only thing I haven't tried is putting on a SCSI drive instead to see if that helps. It's so frustrating because things like IE take 3 seconds to load (only 1 second at home) and even checking email there is a noticeable pause when clicking on an email to read.

I'm surpised I"m not the only one running into this kind of problem. It seems like it must be some sort of XP issue where some driver features are disabled (like caching or something or that it's really in PIO or SOMETHIGN strange anyway).

I'm stumped. Please remember, I started doing the benchmark precisely because I noticed the performance problem first. It does feel far too slow.

Hi, did you say you tried a controller card, something like a Promise controller card? And bypass the motherboards Pri. IDE channel altogether. I did this with my system just to make use of old hard drives I had, and WOW to my surprize got a very large, and noticeable increase in speed. The cost was only about $35.00. Windows98se thinks of it as a SCSI setup! that might bypass the XP issues.

Just an idea.

Hmm, this crap NT machine (ran with a stack of apps in use):

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...

Just interested Frogboy (as a long-standing dual CPU user) - which motherboard you have in that baby ?