Pentium III based notebook HDD issues

Hi,
I received a Toshiba 2805-S402 the other day for free. It had these specifications:

Intel P3 850MHz
Intel i815EM/ICH-2M
256MB PC100 (128 onboard, 128 added in)
30GB/4200RPM IBM Travelstar HDD
Win2K Pro
GeForce2 Go 16MB

So, I upgraded the hard drive to a 100GB Fujistu 4200RPM hard disk from my dad's old laptop, and installed XP SP3. After moving a bunch of files over Ethernet to this laptop and installing a few essential programs, my laptop has slowed down exponentially. The XP loading screen passes about 10 bars now. I was looking through the files that I had moved over and stumbled across HDTune. I installed it and ran the test.



The HDD definitely seems to have some major issues with this laptop. The transfer rate and latency should not be this bad. The drive is running at UDMA 66, write caching is enabled. Help please?

-J.B.

 

You might have run HD Tune, when copying files, or when the HDD is working in the background.

Try terminating as many "User" processes in task manager, and then run HD Tune.

 

the fact that you have only 256MB is not helping.

Are you runing an anti-virus?

Creating partition and dedicating one to the paging file will definitly help.

 

Okay, I let the laptop stay idle for a few minutes and re-ran the test. My results were:

Min: 14.5MB/s
Max: 30.6MB/s
Avg: 24.4MB/s
AT:32.0ms
BR:28.5MB/s

I guess that I had run the first test at a bad time or something. I suppose these numbers are what i'm going to get with a couple year-old 4200RPM/100GB hard drive.

-J.B.

 

In my opinion 4200rpm HDD are only good to use as external HDDs (with 2.5" USB enclosures). 5400rpm are the minimum for a smoth functioning.

You could reduce the size of XP using nLite. I manage to get the installation file to 159MB (ISO file including SP3), and when installed on the harddrive it takes less than 500MB (less than 600MB with drivers).

This is a good tutorial if you want to give it a go:
http://www.i64x.com/eeexp.php

 

That access time and burst rate are weird. My old 4K40 did better than that.

 

jstn, can you post an image of the info tab from hdtune.
I can almost bet that your laptop can only support ata 33 so your harddrive will be limited by the interface. If that is the case, that would explain why the drive is performing pretty bad. Also for a 4200rpm drive those results are pretty normal if it wasnt for the huge dips (probably from background processes running)

K-TRON

 

I updated the BIOS(apparently there was an "XP Only" bios available) and I am running the tests again. I will have screenies up in a few minutes.

EDIT: Screenies (just taken after BIOS update)



And the info page (for K-TRON)



@ K-TRON: I must note that before the BIOS update, the Info tab displayed the computer's IDE interface as running at UDMA 66. After the BIOS update, the interface now runs at UDMA 100, as seen in the picture. This notebook does support ATA-100 because it uses an Intel 815EM/ICH-2M chipset combination which was nearly the last Pentium 3 chipset and the ICH-2 southbridge had introduced ATA-100 back in '01.

-J.B.

 

Those results seem very reasonable for a 4200 rpm hard drive.

The "dips" are probably the result of another program or the operating system accessing your hard drive. Since you have so little RAM, your computer probably makes heavy usage of the page file. That would explain the "dips".

If you want windows XP SP3 to run better on that laptop, I would highly recommend that you upgrade your RAM.

 

wow, that bios upgrade really helped, your seek times are half of what they were, and the drive is performing a bit better overall.
You should run a defragment on the drive, and that should hopefully get rid of some of those nasty peaks in the performance chart.

Otherwise, your system now supports ata 100, so if you wanted to, you could upgrade to a faster harddrive without having to worry about overhead bottlenecks from the ata 66 controller.

K-TRON

 

disable unnecessary services from starting and remove any and all unneeded startup items. I rehabed an old PIII laptop a couple years ago and it was a fun project.

 

also check for bad sectors in Command Prompt:
- type: CHKDSK C: /F
- say Yes, and restart the system

 

I did the same thing few months back on a PII based laptop but in reverse order. I stripped down windows before installinf it using nLite. Although this laptop had only 128MB, it's boot time was fater than a Pentium Duo Core E2160 / 2GB / 250GB desktop with vista

nLite is WinXP best friend