Nforce4 IDE drivers from NVIDIA and HD performance

[ugotd8]

OK, so here was the problem:

Using DVD Shrink 3.2, I re-authored and then backed up a DVD Movie from a Maxtor Maxline III 16MB cache 300G HD to a WD 36G Raptor. This process
took 3 minutes and 58 seconds and averaged 29.5KB/s (that would be 29 Megabytes a second).

I thought, wow, these SATA drives are more or less the best you can buy short of SCSI, why am I only getting 29MB/s ? So, I tried the same process on my Intel rig (ASUS P5WD2/P4 640/955x chipset). The result? 1 minute 45 seconds elapsed time and 47MB/s. That's more like it, but damn, what's wrong with the AMD rig?

Solution: remove the crap NVIDIA IDE Drivers

Result: elapsed time 1 minute 20 seconds, a whopping 54MB/s

I suppose that the NVIDIA IDE drivers are CPU bound or just plain buggy. In any case how could they have missed such a disparity in performance?

So I'm a happy camper running the standard issue MS XP64 IDE controller drivers.

[ugotd8]

Wasn't satisfied with just removing the Nvidia IDE drivers. Went searching some other forums and found a suggestion to disable "Read disk Cache" on the Nvidia SATA controller properties. Worked like a charm. No need to use the MS drivers after all. Doh!

[Ugly n Grey]

Interesting tip, thanks for sharing

[ugotd8]

Update: last night with the Nvidia IDE drivers installed and the read cache disabled, computer was doing nothing but playing MP3s with Winamp 5.1, many many skips in playback. Today, went back to MS XP64 standard IDE driver on the drive with the MP3s, NO SKIPS.

Not looking good for Nvidia and their IDE driver.