Performance issues

Am told by PC Pitstop that I have a hard drive problem. cached speed is at 90.88, uncached speed 2.29. The average should be 153 MB cached and 4.25 uncached.

Ihave tried all suggested solutions to improve condition without success.

I have a Generic IDE type 47 HD, DMA is checked for the drive.

I have run several tests with Zone Alarm disabled, MacAfee disabled. Neither has any effect.

I have to-day ran Scan disk, Disk clean and Defraged the drive.

Short of cleaning out the tower are there any other steps to be taken to determine what is causing this condition.

I am contemplating installing a larger drive, 60gig but want to clean up this problem first.

John R Heintz

This question was answered on February 20, 2003. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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There are several things that can affect the performance of a Hard Drive:

1) if you have a CD-ROM on the same connection (Primary/secondary arrangement) that might slow it down as CD-ROM is accessed and takes up bandwith, also additional harddrives may cause this problem, upgrading to a better connection will help, such as SCSI

2) try increasing swap space, as that will increase performance in some cases (especially in a low RAM case)

3) get more RAM as this will decrease access time in some cases

4) applications running in the background may affect the performance, but I think you already looked into that.

5) some harddrives have low built-in cache, a really good harddrive will have up to 2megabytes

6) if you are getting a new harddrive get ones with higher RPMs, if you want a really fast one get something above or equal to 10,000 RPM, the downside is the price which is quite high for fast HDs

Good luck,

alex

About the author

Posted by Alex of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on February 20, 2003

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