Not enough bandwidth?

[xiphrex]

Hi,

This problem is really bugging me.

I have an Asus P5N-E SLI coupled with a e5400 clocked at 3.8ghz. Everything is stable and with decent temps.

Everything is fast, except when there is any sort of hard drive access or transfer between hard drives.

For example, right now, I am transfering quite a few gig across from one hard drive to another, both on sata. CPU usage is hovering around 5-10%. But my pc feels like the CPU is at 100% and even browsing the internet is slower. I am logged into MSN messenger, but loading up the messenger window to see which contacts are online takes ages, with a lot of hard drive thrashing. Loading firefox to post this took 4 times the amount of time it usually does.

Both of these programs, as is windows, is on a seperate hard drive that is not being read from or transferred to in the copying.

My only suspicion is that there is not enough bandwidth somehow at the northbridge to accommodate the file transfer and normal PC usage?

Has anyone had this problem before.

As basically at the moment I have 2 cpu cores sitting at 3.8 ghz but when there is any sort of hard drive access I might as well be running a celeron.

 

[HazardO]

Well for a start the celeron would be fast enough for disk to disk transfer, the bottlenecks are probably the disks, not the CPU.

It could be symptomatic of a failing hard disk though, you could check the S.M.A.R.T stats for each drive (wikiedia suggests speedfan can tell you, but there's bound to be alternatives).

 

[Gzero]

Did you try disabling your anti virus if you have one running?

 

[xiphrex]

No I havent tried disabling the antivirus, will give that a shot.

Its just Ive had lots of pcs before and they havent had this problem, only when I upgraded to core2duo both e4300 and my current cpu on the same mobo have this issue.

If it was a failing hard drive then I dont understand why it is presenting like this, or which one is failing, as I have 4 hard drives in total, and any transfer between any of them causes the same sluggishness. In fact, loading a program which access the hard drives such as outlook 2007 which needs to uncompress its inbox files etc on load, the whole pc experiences the same symptoms.