🚀 go-pugleaf

I recently bought a Seagate 80GB Drive.  The Problem I'm having is that it
is working considerably slow compared to by 2 year old Fujitsu 13GB Drive.
The write speed on the 80GB drive isn't too bad but the read speed is the
main problem.

I installed Windows XP Home on the 80GB using NTFS as the file system as I
suspected that it could be the FAT32 file system struggling to handle the
large drive.  Unfortunately it wasn't and Windows XP ran extremely slowly
due to the slow read speed.

I then reformatted the drive again as FAT32 using Seagate's Disc Wizard
Software.  This allowed me to change to the Cluster size to 512bytes which
is the smallest possible.  This showed some initial speed up in the read and
write speed of the drive however with the huge amount of Clusters now on the
drive it meant calculating the free space of the drive too a few minutes
when accessing the drive through My Computer or any other software which
requires to free space of the drive to be reported.

I took the drive into a local Computer Store who went into the BIOS and
manually entered in the drives charatesteriscs.  This then meant the drive
in the BIOS was 8455MB.  The drive is still fully accessible as 80GB within
Windows however.  They re-partition and formatted the hard drive and
returned it and claimed it worked. However this wasn't the case.

Another thing I tried was installed Dynamic Disc Overlay (DDO) which is used
on motherboards and BIOS's that don't support large hard drives.  This
didn't provide any improvement either.

I have benchmarked the drives using Norton Utilities and this also shows the
drive to be noticeable slower than the 13GB.  For example on the Physical
Benchmark the 13GB Drive has a Drive Throughput of 13.5MB/s while the 80GB
is low at 6.0MB/s and has been as low as 0.6MB/sec at one stage.

Outline below is some information about my system:
- CA61 Motherboard with a VIA 693A/596B (PC-133) Chipset.
- Intel Pentium 3 550Mhz (100Mhz x 5.5)
- 128MB SDRAM

IDE Configuration
- Primary Master - Fujitsu MPE3136AT - (13GB Drive)
- Primary Slave - Seagate ST380021A - (80GB Drive)
- Secondary Master - EMPTY
- CD-ROM 40x/AKU

Expansion Cards
AGP - TNT2 M64 32MB
PCI - Creative Vibra 128 Sound Card
PCI - 10/100 NIC
PCI - Lifeview FlyVideo 3000 TV Tuner

Running Windows 98SE with FAT32 on all drives.

Sorry for the long post but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Feel free also to e-mail me regarding this issue at
80gig@REMOVETOEMAILnathster.cjb.net. Remove the 'REMOVETOEMAIL' part.

Thanks,
Bill