Hard drive cache question

[mr soft]

hello again .
While running pc pitstop I recieved these results. The last line has me worried. This is after ,disk cleanup,reg repair and defrag. Any suggestions?




Drive label C :WINDOWS XP D: FAT BOY
Partition format NTFS NTFS
Cluster size 1 KB 1 KB
Size 57239 MB 194480 MB
Free space 45586 MB (80%) 52810 MB (27%)
Junk files 71 MB (0%) 0 MB (0%)
Data fragmentation 9% Not tested
File fragmentation 0% Not tested
Uncached speed 24 MB/s (57%) 50 MB/s (119%)

[Blue_MiSfit]

Don't let a synthetic benchmark worry you :)

Try SiSoft Sandra, Everest, or some other alternative. You may get entirely different results.

The main factors in hard drive speed are fragmentation level, and free space. You are defragged and have plenty of free space (15-20% is my recommendations to keep full speed). It's possible that something is wrong, but I wouldn't worry unless you notice excessive hard drive thrashing.

[foxyshadis]

You probably have C: on the innermost sectors of the hard drive, and D: on the outermost. Assuming they're the same drive, that is; if not you might have a DMA issue with the C: one. Or it might just be a slow drive, with no details it's impossible to say.

[mr soft]

Thanks for the replies:

The hard drives are as
C. windows only, 60 gig barracuda IV ,ultra ata 100 ,master, set on end of ribbon ,no partition. I have read that a partition will make it faster . If this is so , should I just use Seagate disk wizard ?

D. 200 gig diamond maxtor ata 133 ,slave ,no partition , all my junk. I bought the barracuda a long time ago .

I ran pc wizard , great free tool . I benchmarked it ,here are the results.

6911

[foxyshadis]

Instead of partitioning and still failing to get the layout you want, just get UltimateDefrag, which will lay your files out in the optimal way for access speed, if you tweak the options a bit. Run it every three months ago, and it'll fix up whatever windows updates and other installs have strewn files around. Partitioning will only ensure that files are a minimum distance from the outer track, not that they're placed properly for high speed reading.

Raw access speed isn't changed at all by partitioning, so that benchmark wouldn't even change. Have you tried resetting the DMA to see if that speeds up the windows drive, btw? TO do that, you go into device manager (control panel->system->hardware), open ide controllers, and just uninstall the primary ide controller. When you reboot it'll be reinstalled with DMA 5 re-enabled, if supported. (Don't do this if you've done something silly like deleted the /windows/inf folder though. It's not worth the hassle. ;_; )

[mr soft]

I have ultra DMA 5 on C , and ultra DMA 6 on D.
Ultimate defrag is great thanks ,It took me a while to read through , however after defrag and sorting I have 18% fragmented, app. 1600mb. If I analyze in windows again it keeps saying ,you should defrag this drive, even though it looks clean.

I only changed these two drives to ntfs recently, I don´t know if this might have affected anything.

Thanks for the help.

[mr soft]

Ok my problem was my fragmented pagefiles, and hybernation files. I found a great free tool if anyone faces similar problems.
sysinternals ,pagedefrag.
18 % before 0.1 % now .
very happy bunny :)