Slow OS harddrive performance in XP
by Antti Turpeinen
on
Mar 22, 2008 at 9:19:20 am
Hello,
I'm runnning XP via Bootcamp on Mac Pro 2008. I have partitioned 200 GB for OSX (HFS+) and 100 GB for WinXP (NTFS).
My OS disk is performing very slowly in XP. Blackmagic Speed Test gives me 60+ MB/s on OSX side and the same physical disk gets only 45 MB/s on XP. Can this be improved by installing different SATA drivers straight from Intel or ??
Better approach might be transferring the XP partition to its' own dedicated harddisk. What is the easiest way to do this ?? I know such utilities as Acronis TrueImage etc. won't work. Would WinClone work ?
Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Ron Lindeboom on Mar 23, 2008 at 12:30:46 am
I will gladly stand corrected on this if there are those who do so successfully, but I have yet to see anyone running full bandwidth video apps under Windows in either Bootcamp or Parallels.
If you need video applications under Windows, better to run them on a Windows box.
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Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Uli Plank on Mar 23, 2008 at 8:16:52 am
We are quite happy with the performance of After Effects and a few compression programs under Bootcamp (with the newest Windows drivers for our graphics card). I wouldn't care too much about speed of the boot drive, get a dedicated media drive (formatted to NTFS, of course) and the thing flies.
Parallels (or any other virtual box) is much slower and only handy for some small things or tests under Windows.
Regards,
Uli
Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts
Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Ron Lindeboom on Mar 23, 2008 at 4:42:33 pm
Hey Uli,
I have had absolutely zero luck getting a MacBook Pro to run any real processor-intensive video apps under Bootcamp. I can run After Effects easily enough but apps that require real throughput -- say like Vegas or Premiere Pro -- I've been far less than successful. (Of course, with so little time to devote to debugging and having a PC here when I need them, I don't really give it much effort, in fairness and to be honest.)
Are you saying that you do it? And that it works? If so, do you get the same kinds of throughput as you do running say, Final Cut?
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Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Uli Plank on Mar 23, 2008 at 5:47:00 pm
Hi Ron,
since I'm always working with FCP, I didn't care to try video editing under Bootcamp.
But processor intensive tasks like encoding to MPEG-2 or H.264 work very well on a MacPro for me, even when compared to a pretty powerful PC next to it. This was my main concern, since I'm not too happy with Compressor.
Best regards,
Uli
Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts
Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Ron Lindeboom on Mar 23, 2008 at 8:10:39 pm
I wanted to use Vegas as an audio app for a job and had to give up on it, Aharon. I also had no luck with Cinescore. All my other audio apps are Mac-based so they don't have the issue, but like you I would love to hear how people are finding success with audio apps under Bootcamp or Parallels.
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Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Aharon Rabinowitz on Mar 24, 2008 at 3:44:42 pm
Ron- What do you record with on the Mac side? I'm looking for a multi track recorder with noise reduction tools and a multiband compressor. So far, Final Cut Studio's SoundTrack Pro 2 seems like the only option.
Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Ron Lindeboom on Mar 24, 2008 at 6:54:58 pm
My favorite audio "chainsaw" is Steinberg Nuendo. It is the one I use for all my audio projects as I know it far better than Logic, Soundtrack or anything else.
But Logic and Soundtrack are each great tools in their own rite.
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Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Antti Turpeinen on Mar 26, 2008 at 4:29:05 pm
Hello,
been doing work for a while so I'm finally returning here to my post. I'll be trying to restore WinClone image this week to a clean dedicated Bootcamp drive and see if I'll have better disk performance in XP.
While my OS (win xp) partition is bit slow I've narrowed the slow-ish seek times etc. to be only on Nuendo4. For some reason Nuendo3 works fine on the same computer and has much faster seek times and better disk performance overall.
I use OSX for FCS2/video and Windows for Nuendo/audio.
For what some people say Mac Pro not being able to deliver great results in audio/video/data throughput intense programs on Windows I find quite contrary. The current Mac Pros (2008 5400-chipsets) perform amazinly well in terms of CPU/bandwidth/etc. Nuendo (both 3 and 4) do run better on Windows than OSX, both in real world and benchmarking tests. But so far only audio program fully utilizing all 8-cores seems to be Reaper. Btw. not even Logic8 utilizes all procesors fully and does not run that great on low latencies.
I'm not starting a debate here at all osx vs. windows vs. logic vs. nuendo vs. reaper. Just sharing info and trying to get my system run best to its' ability.
Thanks for all info. I will post update after giving Windows a dedicated harddrive instead of just a partition on the same disk with osx.
Re: Slow OS harddrive performance in XP by Simon Wyndham on Apr 10, 2008 at 1:14:31 pm
I've been using Vegas quite happily under Bootcamp. There's no reason why things should be slow as Bootcamp is running things natively not under emulation. Most benchmarks I have seen seem to show Macs with Bootcamp are often faster than native PC's!
