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I installed SiSoft's Sandra this AM. This is an outstanding bundle of utilites. My concern was raised when I ran the File System Benchmark for each of my hard drives.

My original Local Disk (C:), when benchmarked four times, showed rates of 16075, 18092, 30377, and 16562 kB/s. It's wierd that the only 30k+ rate I got was when I benchmarked while online (silly me.) My Local Disk is the Master on IDE 1 and is a Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm with 8MB cache. It is the drive that I've been concerned about failing due to periodic (not lately) access noise. My WinXPpro OS is on this Local Disk.

My secondary Spare Disk (E:), when twice benchmarked, showed rates of 36392 and 36371 kB/s. Which is over twice as fast in general. My Spare Disk is a Maxtor 80GB 2MB cache just received from Maxtor as a replacement for a previous failure and is the Slave also on IDE 1. This Spare Drive is a data backup only with no OS.

Can someone suggest a likely reason for the differences in data transfer rates? Am I looking at a significant problem with the slower drive?

Thank you for reviewing my results.

Side note: Would it necessarily be better to place the Spare Disk on IDE 2 instead of a slave to my Local Disk on IDE 1?

Comments

Arranger Thu, 02/13/2003 - 17:32

OK, now I've run FreshDiagnose and HardDrive Benchmark as follows:
C: Local Drive writes at 23.09 MB/s and reads at 13.84 MB/x
E: Spare Drive writes at 32.62 MB/s and reads at INF MB/s. There is no OS on the spare drive.

Both drives share IDE 1. The local is the master, the spare the slave.

Can anyone shed light on my results? Thanks for the look over!