Poor Diskmark result - solved

[fi_chris]

I have just completed my first PC build and have some concerns about my disk performance. The system specification is as follows:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 @2.66GHz
Motherboard: ASUS P5KR
Memory: 2 x 1GB DDR2 800MHz
HDD: WD1600AAJS
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256Mb
OS: Windows XP

Using v6.1 of Performance Test my CPU Mark (1584) and my Memory Mark (675) look reasonable (for this specification).

However the Disk Mark (34) looks very very low (for comparison a baseline with same CPU/HDD achieves 423).

Individual disk results were:
Sequential Read: 3.84
Sequential Write: 3.68
Random Seek + RW: 2.05

Comparing against some baselines (similar CPU and Memory) the Random Seek + RW performance is reasonable (but on the low side), however the Sequential results are down by a factor of at least 10 .

Do I have a problem?

If I do have a problem where do I start looking for a solution?

The HDD was new for the build.

Not very important to me but interesting are my 3D Mark results. Again looking at some baselines I seem to get reasonable result in 3D-Complex (52) but very poor results in 3D-Medium (3) and 3D-Simple (5). Anyone know why this should be?

[David (PassMark)]

Yes you have a problem with the hard drive.The result is much too low for the drive. Most probably it is just a bad device driver for the MB or BIOS configuration. But it also could be some other factor, like bad SATA cabling or some background task using the drive fairly heavily when the test was running.

[fi_chris]

I have found that the to transfer mode on my hard drive had slipped from DMA back to PIO. Not sure when/why this happened, but have managed to reset everything back to Ultra DMA Mode 5 (using information from this link, http://winhlp.com/node/10 ) and things are working much faster now. Will have to see if it stays in DMA now or slips back to PIO again.

Discmark is now a much more respectable 435.