HDs and Sandra 2000

[Andrés]

Why do I always get very low hard disk scores in SiSoft Sandra 2000?
A friend of mine had a Seagate 20 Gb U10 and later replaced it with a Maxtor DiamondMax VL20 20 Gb. I have read that the Maxtor is faster (storagereview.com), but the results he gets in S2000 are both very low and almost the same.
He is getting near 4500! I saw a bench in a web site with the U10 and it was quite higher (don't remember, maybe 8000+?)
Is it necessary to download some IDE drivers or something? Has the optimization of the disk something to do with the score?
His specs:
P3 667EB
Soyo 7VBA
64 Mb PC133
Maxtor VL20
Diamond Stealth SIII 540 (who cares?)
Onboard audio enabled (ugh! maybe soon he'll buy a Live!)

[aug1516]

Becuase it is based on the VIA chipset you need to make sure that he has downloaded the latest VIA 4 in 1 drivers for his board. Here is the link to download them.
http://www.viatech.com/drivers/4in1424a.zip

You also need to check and see if he has DMA enabled for his hard drives. You do this by double-clicking on them in Device Manager, it should be under the settings tab at the top, you will should see a box labed DMA make sure that it is checked. The box may not appear until he installs the VIA drivers. You may also want to run scan disk and defrag his drive.

[Andrés]

You were damn right!!!!!
The Sandra score went from 4500 to 15000+!!!!!
It's really amazing. Now I hope this translates to faster real-world hard disk performance.

[COZITSTHERE]

I am glad your benchmark scores improved! Keep in mind that the bottom line is "are you happy with the drives performance?" If you are what difference does it make what the benchmark says. Most benchmark programs do not seem to reflect real world performance. You are the best judge of how hardware works on your system.