Improving Hard Drive Performance in Windows XP

Introduction

As we noted in our first round of Windows XP benchmark tests, the operating system's hard drive performance is disappointing, even when teamed with optimized ATA66 or ATA100 controllers and suitable driver software. As we showed, Windows XP did not produce the expected high-performance results from our test system's D850MDAL motherboard (based on Intel's i850 chipset) -- it was, in fact, about half of what it should be!

• Windows XP & ATA100 drive/controller    
• ATAU100 RAID0 7200RPM 40GB
• ATA100RPM 30GB
• ATAU66 RAID0 7200RPM 28GB
• ATAU66 7200 RPM 28GB = 17000

The above results were obtained with the disk benchmark test SiSoft Sandra 2001. Notice that Windows XP achieved a score of only 7608, compared to a Windows 2000 (with ATA100 drivers) score of 14563. Even after loading optimized ATA100 drivers especially designed by Intel for our test system's D850MDAL motherboard, XP scored only 7960  -- still pretty dismal.

However, the situation improved dramatically after running Tweak-XP, from www.totalidea.de. We applied the tweak listed as "enable UDMA66 mode" and re-ran the benchmark. (Note that this tweak only works on Intel chipsets.) Now look at the results....

• After enabling "UDMA66" mode in Tweak-XP    
• ATAU100 RAID0 7200RPM 40GB
• ATA100RPM 30GB
• ATAU66 RAID0 7200RPM 28GB
• ATAU66 7200 RPM 28GB = 17000

Not bad, eh? The drive -- a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus DM60 20GB Ultra ATA100 IDE model (<8.7ms ) -- now outperforms all but a dedicated RAID0 implementation costing more than twice as much.

Conclusion
Microsoft has apparently not enabled ATA66 or ATA100 transfer modes in Windows XP by default.-- presumably for compatibility purposes (some hard disk manufacturers did the same thing in the firmware of their drives not too long ago). To achieve maximum performance on newer hardware, a registry hack -- or the application of a tweaking tool such as Tweak-XP -- is required. Tweak-XP can be used 50 times before it must be registered. You only need to apply this fix once. Anyone with an ATA66 or ATA100 controller, 80-pin cable and a suitable hard drive not using it is missing out on some serious improvements in hard disk performance.

For Further Reading:
PC Buyer's Guide: Pentium 4 test report.

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