Hi, i just built a new computer, went from a 2.8 P4 to the E6600 Core 2 Duo. For some reason, the computer seems to run at nearly the same speed as my old computer. On every level this computer is much faster than the old one, but the speed difference is negligible.

Is there just a general way I can test to see what could be going on? Because I'm gonna be pretty upset if I spent ~$900 on a computer that really doesn't go much faster than my old one.

Here are some specs on the computer:

2GB DDR2 800 RAM, Patriot
500GB 3.0 Gb/S SATA HDD, Samsung
P6N SLI MoBo - MSI
E6600 Core 2 Duo
430W Thermaltake Power supply

Also, My average data transfer rate is 25MB/s, on both Windows and Linux. My IDE hard drives are faster. I have got to have set something up wrong

That transfer rate seems a bit slow, but it could be that that Samsung model really is that slow. Don't be fooled by any claims of fast "burst" transfer rates. What a completely useless marketing statistic! It says absolutely nothing about how fast the drive actually is.

As for the other stuff...well, you've actually gone down in clock speed a little bit from 2.8Ghz to 2.4Ghz. The greater efficiency of Core 2 Duo's design should more than make up for that difference, though.

Well, I went off of reviews of a bunch of places, and it was rated on the higher end of things. I really never read a bad review off of it. I think pcmagazine rated it in the top 3?

This is the model # for the HDD: HD501LJ

Anybody own this model or know anything about it?

Is that the spinpoint Samsung? Just wrote a few files to mine earlier today and I get 50MB/s on average.

And as for the performance increase associated with moving to C2D 6600, I've become a bit sceptical myself. I was very impressed when I moved from a 667Mhz CPU with 256MB RAM to a C2D6600 with 2GB DDR2. The performance was much better indeed. But I recently got myself a second pc that has an AMD3800 and 1GB of DDR400 and I now have to say that the C2D really isn't all that much faster. A bit more fluent, a bit more stable, but for most applications, that's about it. I got my new system when the C2D was just out so you can imagine I paid a whole lot more than 900$ at the time. A bit of a disappointment, actually.

Yes, it is. And that is more or less the average speed online, but my average is 22-28 MB/s. What could make it this slow?

Well, I went to tomshardware.com and they have an array of cpu's with an array of benchmark tests, and in nearly everyone of those tests the C2D beat out my old processor by nearly 2x, so naturally I assummed to see a performance increase around that same area.

Hmm, since you're getting the same results in from both windows and Linux, it would appear to be a hardware issue. Mine is actually connected to a Promise PCI Sata controller; the mobo does have onboard sata controllers but I had some reasons (wich involve MS) to use an extra card.

Anyway, have you experimented with the options that are available from BIOS? IDE, AHCI, ... Have you tried plugging into a different port (there's always the chance that one port is somewhat defective)?

Edit: I'm familiar with that chart, it's what guided my choice as well. I've come to agree with people who say that benchmarks are completely unreliable: they use an artificial setting that is nothing like real-world situations.

I'll have to check those options out. I'm at work now but will be home within 20 mins, so I'll check on it then.

If you are using the same hard drive the previous system, the speed of loading programs will not be any different. Though if you do massive number crunching, you will see at least two folds of improvement. Samsung hard drives performs horrible on general tasks. I recommend Hitachi or Western Digital. If you do not want a lot of noise and want near Western Digital "Raptor" performance, Hitachi's 1 TB should be used.

My rating for hard drive manufactures are as follows.
1) Hitachi
2) Western Digital
3) Maxtor
4) Seagate
5) Samsung

There are two categories to rate hard drives. One is accessing time or the time that the hard drive takes to find the data. The other is throughput or sequential input/output. A lot of people still think throughput is the value to look at on terms of speed. When you are waiting for programs to load up, you want to find a hard drive that is quick finding the data. Throughput can always be increased using RAID-0. I rate hard drives based on accessing time and low latency. Throughput is the least of my worries.

Well, I just bought this hard drive less than 2 weeks ago.

I guess I'm gonna have to buy a new hard drive, so what should I get if I am looking for a 500GB SATA 3 Gb/s one?

OK, I just don't understand this. I am getting 2.68 MB/s xfer rates from the samsung to another. What is going on?? This is making absolutely no sense whatsoever.

This is absolutely ridiculous. What factors could cause this? Motherboard? SATA to IDE?

Are you using Gnome? I'm getting horrible results moving anything from within Gnome, whether it is from/to my Samsung or Western Digital drives: 3 to 4 MB/s, at best. When I switch to KDE, I find that I do get 50MB/s. And when I move stuff using the command line in Gnome, it is just as fast (but using the command line actually means no Gnome, which would explain the difference).

As for Electro's recommendation, I'm not 100% sure. Samsung may have had a poor reputation but this latest line of Spinpoints appears to be much better than their earlier drives. I just benchmarked my Western Digital drives against the Samsung and they get beaten by a considerable 11MB/s. Or is hdparm unreliable as a benchmark?

ATM I am using Vista, however, the speeds are the same on Linux as well.