hard drive performance increase on my IFL90

I was playing around with my IFL90 today and I came across something interesting. When I launched HD tune it showed my hard drive as running in UMDA5 mode which I thought was kind of strange. I also noticed windows has some extra policies under the device manager for “advanced performance.”
I decided to test my hard drive (120gb seagate 7200.2) with hd tune to see if any of those settings made a difference. I should mention I set hd tune’s settings to the most accurate in hopes of getting better results. I also ran each test a couple times to ensure I didn’t get a flakey result, and I locked my cpu at its lowest speed (1.0ghz) to get an idea of the cpu usage.
Attachment 1.png shows how windows was running after a fresh install of vista 32bit business. This is with the latest chipset drivers installed.

Attachment settings.jpg shows what the policy screen looks like. To get here open the device manager, go under disk drives, then double click on the hard drive. It is under the policy tab.
Attachment 2.png shows the result I get from enabling advanced performance, nothing too spectacular.

After trying to figure out why hd tune says my hard drive is running in UDMA5 mode I figured I’d try installing the intel matrix manager to see what it said. I downloaded it from intel’s website and installed it. After installing it, hd tune now says my hard drive supports NCQ and other things that it didn’t before. I tested this with hd tune (attachment 3.png) and it did make a little bit of a difference, especially in my burst speed and maximum transfer speed. The best thing about this driver is that lowered my cpu usage dramatically.

So maybe this will be an easy way to get a little more battery life and performance out of your laptop, I say give it a try. Also this will work on 945 and 915 mobile chipsets, so people with the HEL-80s would probably benefit from this as well.

 

Thanks!

I'm going to try that


Let's see what happens

 

Interesting.

May look into that later.