Hi,
I was looking for help with a hard drive problem I seem to be encountering which I've only noticed since after I purchased the Asrock 939Dual Sata2 board.
Basically it occurs when I'm quickpar'ing large archives or extracting rar's on a large hard drive on any of the ide channels.
I've got a Western Digital PATA 320gb as IDE1 Master and a Western Digital PATA 250gb as IDE2 Slave running on a Opteron 146 (o/ced to 2.5ghz).
Now if I use quickpar verify a large archive (comprised of multiple 50 meg parts) on any drive it goes at full speed, takes about a second to check one 50mb part and doesnt take long at all to check the whole archive.
However heres where the problem occurs.
Should I start checking another archive while the first is still going through the verification process the hard drive begins to *crawl*.
Now theres no problem with the hard drive that I can see, HDtach rates it at 57mb/s with a 92mb/s burst rate and about 2% cpu utilisation.
Also when actually just watching the process for one archive everything goes as I expect it to, the cpu usage jumps up to 30-40% ish and the hdd light on my case is solid until the job is complete.
Launch the second verification process and the cpu usage then drops to 5-10% and the hard drive case light goes a fair bit darker as if its not being used as much.
Its a strange problem and has had me puzzled for days, its almost as if when the hard drive/system is asked to access multiple files it slows down *much* more than it should.
I do not remember this occuring on my old Athlon 3200+/NF7S v2 board and I definately would have spotted it because it is incredibly annoying. My new system actually takes *much* longer loading BF2 maps, which can't be right. I'm assuming this is related as it seems to archive related.
Whats weird is that a sata maxtor drive running on the board performs as I would expect it to, there is a slow down but nowhere even near as drastic.
Is the IDE bus being saturated, its really driving me mad as I've reinstalled windows, tried switching the hdd controller in windows from the ali to a standard pci controller, tried a different cable, tried different settings of jumpers on the disks. Tried different combinations of every setting relating to IDE in the bios (busmaster on/off, block, 32bit transfers) all to no avail!
At this point the only thing I think it can be is something with the motherboard (onboard ide controller on the south bridge)?
Anyone encountered this issue, it seems to be just me!
Any help or advice offered would be appreciated as its driving me insane.
System:
AMD 64 Opteron 146 (2.5ghz)
Asrock 939Dual Sata 2 motherboard (1.50 bios)
1024mb twinmos ram (cas 2.5)
Seasonic 430w powersupply
WD 320gb IDE Cavier SE (IDE1 - Master)
WD 250gb IDE Cavier SE (IDE1 - Slave)
Maxtor 40gb (IDE2 - Master)
LG 16x DVDburner (IDE2 - Slave)
WD 74gb (Sata1-2)
Maxtor 250gb (Sata1-1)
BFG 6800GT AGP.
I was looking for help with a hard drive problem I seem to be encountering which I've only noticed since after I purchased the Asrock 939Dual Sata2 board.
Basically it occurs when I'm quickpar'ing large archives or extracting rar's on a large hard drive on any of the ide channels.
I've got a Western Digital PATA 320gb as IDE1 Master and a Western Digital PATA 250gb as IDE2 Slave running on a Opteron 146 (o/ced to 2.5ghz).
Now if I use quickpar verify a large archive (comprised of multiple 50 meg parts) on any drive it goes at full speed, takes about a second to check one 50mb part and doesnt take long at all to check the whole archive.
However heres where the problem occurs.
Should I start checking another archive while the first is still going through the verification process the hard drive begins to *crawl*.
Now theres no problem with the hard drive that I can see, HDtach rates it at 57mb/s with a 92mb/s burst rate and about 2% cpu utilisation.
Also when actually just watching the process for one archive everything goes as I expect it to, the cpu usage jumps up to 30-40% ish and the hdd light on my case is solid until the job is complete.
Launch the second verification process and the cpu usage then drops to 5-10% and the hard drive case light goes a fair bit darker as if its not being used as much.
Its a strange problem and has had me puzzled for days, its almost as if when the hard drive/system is asked to access multiple files it slows down *much* more than it should.
I do not remember this occuring on my old Athlon 3200+/NF7S v2 board and I definately would have spotted it because it is incredibly annoying. My new system actually takes *much* longer loading BF2 maps, which can't be right. I'm assuming this is related as it seems to archive related.
Whats weird is that a sata maxtor drive running on the board performs as I would expect it to, there is a slow down but nowhere even near as drastic.
Is the IDE bus being saturated, its really driving me mad as I've reinstalled windows, tried switching the hdd controller in windows from the ali to a standard pci controller, tried a different cable, tried different settings of jumpers on the disks. Tried different combinations of every setting relating to IDE in the bios (busmaster on/off, block, 32bit transfers) all to no avail!
At this point the only thing I think it can be is something with the motherboard (onboard ide controller on the south bridge)?
Anyone encountered this issue, it seems to be just me!
Any help or advice offered would be appreciated as its driving me insane.
System:
AMD 64 Opteron 146 (2.5ghz)
Asrock 939Dual Sata 2 motherboard (1.50 bios)
1024mb twinmos ram (cas 2.5)
Seasonic 430w powersupply
WD 320gb IDE Cavier SE (IDE1 - Master)
WD 250gb IDE Cavier SE (IDE1 - Slave)
Maxtor 40gb (IDE2 - Master)
LG 16x DVDburner (IDE2 - Slave)
WD 74gb (Sata1-2)
Maxtor 250gb (Sata1-1)
BFG 6800GT AGP.
(well with pliers and a file!)