Weird HD tune results of my drive

[rivet]

Hello,

I have used my 250G Seagate hard drive (an old model, model no. ST3250820NS) as my OS drive for some time now, it seems to operate quite normal. However, when I use HD tune to test performance, it gives me quite weird subpar results. It shows transfer rate minimun 1.0MB/sec, Maximum 4.2MB/sec and Average 3.4MB/sec, access time 13.5ms. This is really too much below what it should be, but I have not notice any thing abnormal of the drive, could it be just sth. that HD tune did not detect the drive right, or is there anything my setting is wrong with drive, or does that indicating my drive is faulty? Thanks very much.

[movieman]

If those are real figures, the drive is probably running in PIO mode rather than DMA; I don't remember how to check that in Windows but it's in the control panel somewhere.

[rivet]

Thanks, I think that is the problem. I checked the device manager, one of the primary IDE channel (device 0) is running in PIO mode, however, the setting is "DMA if available". I really don't know how to fixed this, any opinion?

[movieman]

Check that you have the right drivers for the IDE chipset; also, you could check the BIOS settings in case that's disabling DMA somehow.