Hi
I just installed XP on my new Dell XPS 410 because Vista is so bad (BSOD, numerous incompatibilities). To do it, I bought a new Maxtor 7H500F0 500GB SATA II drive (which seems to have a good reputation for performance) and installed an OEM XP SP2 on that. It got assigned the drive letter H: (C: is the bundled Vista) but apart from that it all seemed to go OK. It's certainly nice to have a relatively stable OS again!
BUT... the performance of the H: drive is truly terrible, especially under XP, where it's the boot drive. Even under Vista, where it's not the boot drive, it seems slower that the bundled WD 320GB drive, but not half as bad as it is under XP. When I access the C: drive from XP, the performance is just as good as when I access it from Vista.
Any activity on the H: drive seems to come with a LOT of track-seek noise, but even on the occasions when this isn't the case, data transfer speeds are still very low. As an example of the relative performance, a file copy that takes 11s on the C: (it's about 230MB, I think, but I'm not at that machine at the moment), take over a minute copying the same file from C: to H:.
As a control, I have an external 500GB IDE drive connected via USB. The same file copy from C: to the external drive is almost as quick as copying from C: to C:.
I ran HD Tune on al three drives from both OSes, and posted the results here. (Select the "original" size to be able to read the text.) As you can see, the throughput of the Maxtor drive is wildly erratic over time, especially under XP. The deep dips are obviously the reason for the lousy performance, but I have no idea why it's happening. I've disabled all possible sources of conflicting disk access, and even the page file on C: even under XP.
One other note: I do the dual boot by physically exchanging the cables, so the boot drive is always on SATA port 0, whether it's the C: drive for Vista or H: for XP.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Oh, BTW, I let the XP install format the Maxtor (using the [very!] long format) instead of using the Maxblaster tools (which I didn't have at the time). Might that make a difference? the drive is fully defragmented anyway.
Thanks!
Pete
I just installed XP on my new Dell XPS 410 because Vista is so bad (BSOD, numerous incompatibilities). To do it, I bought a new Maxtor 7H500F0 500GB SATA II drive (which seems to have a good reputation for performance) and installed an OEM XP SP2 on that. It got assigned the drive letter H: (C: is the bundled Vista) but apart from that it all seemed to go OK. It's certainly nice to have a relatively stable OS again!
BUT... the performance of the H: drive is truly terrible, especially under XP, where it's the boot drive. Even under Vista, where it's not the boot drive, it seems slower that the bundled WD 320GB drive, but not half as bad as it is under XP. When I access the C: drive from XP, the performance is just as good as when I access it from Vista.
Any activity on the H: drive seems to come with a LOT of track-seek noise, but even on the occasions when this isn't the case, data transfer speeds are still very low. As an example of the relative performance, a file copy that takes 11s on the C: (it's about 230MB, I think, but I'm not at that machine at the moment), take over a minute copying the same file from C: to H:.
As a control, I have an external 500GB IDE drive connected via USB. The same file copy from C: to the external drive is almost as quick as copying from C: to C:.
I ran HD Tune on al three drives from both OSes, and posted the results here. (Select the "original" size to be able to read the text.) As you can see, the throughput of the Maxtor drive is wildly erratic over time, especially under XP. The deep dips are obviously the reason for the lousy performance, but I have no idea why it's happening. I've disabled all possible sources of conflicting disk access, and even the page file on C: even under XP.
One other note: I do the dual boot by physically exchanging the cables, so the boot drive is always on SATA port 0, whether it's the C: drive for Vista or H: for XP.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Oh, BTW, I let the XP install format the Maxtor (using the [very!] long format) instead of using the Maxblaster tools (which I didn't have at the time). Might that make a difference? the drive is fully defragmented anyway.
Thanks!
Pete