Hi Greatwolf,
And replay, how were you able to get a transfer rate of 30+kps? mines couldn't even hit 30kps when I was benching it.
Your slow transfer rates could be caused by:
1) DMD not enabled in windows for your drive (control panel > system > etc.). This would be indicated by high CPU usage according to HD Tach.
2) Cable not recognized as ATA66-ATA100 compatible, or installed backwards, or sharing the cable with a slow ATA33 device(?).
3) Onboard ide controller has ATA33 specs (& not the newer ATA66/100/133).
4) There is no number 4
5) Something else, that someone else will think of
Partitioning, and using a smaller OS partition at the beginning of the drive has several benefits.
1) You get a big boost in seek times as the heads don't have to fly all over the drive. The performance approaches those dubious Maxtor specs, more importantly, the speed is on par with the measured speed of the Maxtor 7200 RPM 80G model.
2) The small cluster size of an 8G partition, 4k, saves on slack space compared to the usual 32k partition. It doesn't seem like much, but I have 50,000 files in my windows subdirectory, so it adds up.
3) Easier to back-up your OS and apps from a small partition. Make cloned copies of all or part of your C: drive to the secondary partition, copy from there to CD media for more security.
3a) Easier to reformat just the C: partition, and reinstall the OS, without losing all of the stuff on the other partitions.
Defragment the 80G frequently, as seek times are slow, but transfer rates are not bad once the data is located.
I put my games, MP3s, DivX stuff on the large D: partition. Could have made more partitions, but that can be a pain to work with.
One other question, as far as gaming is concerned which would be more important on which the speed of a game loads? Is seek time more important or the rate at which it can transfer data?
It depends , transfer rate is the key if you have large files, fast seeks are important if you have many files to load (or you let your drive get many fragmented files). Of the two I'd rather have the fastest seek times, if they come with reasonable transfer rates too.