Installation of Drives - Does the order matter?

Baron_Samedi · 19 Jan 2007 at 10:32

Hi Gents,

I presently suffer from really slow hard drive access rates and was wondering whether I am connecting my drives to the correct ports.

Now, presently, I have DVD drives attached to the master and slave ports of the primary IDE socket and a SATA II drive attached to a SATA port (not sure which off the top of my head).

Could it be that my drive access rate is being stunted by attaching slow devices to the primary IDE socket?

Thanks!

Gary

Solari · 19 Jan 2007 at 10:35

Actually I'm not sure SATA2 drive is plugged in to the right slot either... on my DS3 I plugged it into one of the purple SATA ports. Sorry for hijack but saves a new thread

rpstewart · 19 Jan 2007 at 11:09

Baron_Samedi said:
Could it be that my drive access rate is being stunted by attaching slow devices to the primary IDE socket?

Highly unlikely. The SATA controller is entirely independent of the IDE controllers.

Solari said:
Actually I'm not sure SATA2 drive is plugged in to the right slot either... on my DS3 I plugged it into one of the purple SATA ports. Sorry for hijack but saves a new thread

It doesn't really matter which port you use. The DS3 has 2 SATA controllers, one in the Southbridge and a separate Gigabyte RAID controller. The performance for single drives will be similar across both controllers.

Mint_Sauce · 19 Jan 2007 at 11:20

Have you installed proper motherboard drivers and not just let XP use generic ones? Go to your motherboard manufacturers website and get the latest even if you have installed them before.

Baron_Samedi · 19 Jan 2007 at 11:39

Thanks for the input Gents, I take your points but I'm thinking that the DVD's should be attached to the secondary IDE ports....

I'll report back that my effort was a waste of time

Mint_Sauce · 19 Jan 2007 at 12:24

hehe, you're better off having them on separate channels afaik as then should you ever copy one CD/DVD from one drive to the other you'll get better transfer rates. Not that in real terms it'll make much difference but you know, it's nice to have everything working to its fullest.

Baron_Samedi · 19 Jan 2007 at 12:33

Oh well, it was worth a try :-)

BTW I shall change the allocation of drives at the moment!

artaxerxes · 19 Jan 2007 at 12:42

Slow access to a hard disk can be indicative of failure, and SMART is not always enough of a test. I would back up, and look serioulsy at this hard drive's sudden decreasing speed.

Also consider defragging, and if you are running out of room for the swapfile.