A21m Hard Drive Performance

[AlexDBall]

Hi All!

I've got a question that i did not find an answer through the Search options.

I have just aquired an A21m (2628-E1G) which had a faulty hard drive.
I replaced the drive with Hitachi Travelstar IC25N030ATDA04 (30GB) from an old A30 i had.
Installed Windows XP and set it all up.. then i was curious to see where about the performance of this machine is so i installed HD-Tach (http://www.simplisoftware.com)

The results i got were a bit dissapointing, providing that the hard drive's "Burst Speed" was 25MB/s with average read of 20MB/s.
I replaced the drive with an 80GB 5400RPM drive from my T42 and the results were the same.

Both drives in the T42 give a "Burst Speed" of ~60MB/s and an average read of ~50MB/s

I've checked in device manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and for the Primary IDE Channel the Transfer Mode is set to DMA If Available and the Current Transfer Mode is Ultra DMA Mode 2.

I've tried updating the Controller's drivers by installing the Intel Chipset Drivers. but every version i tried said that the operating system has support for the chipset and no update required..

Has anyone noticed/checked for the hard drives performance?
Is there anyway to increase it?

Thanks for your time, any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Alex

[sjthinkpader]

Here is some HDD performance comparative info.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=71881