Only getting 3mb/s out of hard drive

Craig321

Craig321

Craig321

Soldato
Joined
2 May 2004
Posts
19,950
Hi,

I know the first thing I'll be told to do is replace the hard drive... but this problem isn't caused by the hard drive itself, it's caused by something on the motherboard.

I was listening to some music last night, browsing the internet. All of a sudden the music stopped and my mouse started to lag like mad. The music didn't actually stop, it was just lagging so bad that it wouldn't go further into the music due to the hard drive only getting 3mb/s of speed. I muti task quite a bit, so you can imagine what happened when the hard drive all of a sudden lost around 57mb/s.

This morning I booted up into safe mode and it all booted fine... I checked with HDTune and the drive was still only getting 3mb/s of speed, the only reason why it wasn't so bad is because nothing was running meaning the hard drive could use the 3mb/s on whatever I was doing... although when I did load something the mouse lagged like mad.

My second SATA port on my board failed the same way a few months back, I have been using the first one hoping it won't do the same... but it has.

I have tried a different power connector & a different SATA cable, those didn't help at all.

I just wondered if there's anything else I can try do to get this sorted please?

Craig.
 
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If it is a hardware fault on the motherboard (and it sounds like it is given your description) then the best thing you can do is replace the motherboard as hardware faults don't just tend to get better. If you don't want to do that then you could purchase a SATA controller card I suppose but bear in mind the whole motherboard may fail if it is just dying bit by bit.

The only other thing I would check is that the motherboard isn't running in PIO mode, Device Manager should be able to tell you if it is. :)
 
Checked in the device manager, couldn't find anything on PIO mode. How can I make sure it's off?

Also, getting the motherboard replaced or getting a new motherboard isn't really an option, Asus are trying to charge me £12 checking fee, along with the £8 postage I'd have to pay... £20 to check/repair it. That's probably more than half the price it's worth. I really don't want to send it to the company that I bought it from, last time I sent it back to them to try get the second SATA port fixed, they sent it back after over 40 days and the board was not repaired.

I can't buy a new motherboard as I cannot find any AGP boards :(

Can anyone recommend a PCI SATA controller? Bear in mind that i'll need to boot from the drive that's plugged into the controller. Preferably a 2 port one.

Craig.
 
Okay, hopefully I'm onto something here...

I found where it says what the drive is running on in the device manager, I checked through them all and all but one are on DMA.

So I looked through everything in that one to see if it's the one running the main hard drive, under "Bus Relations" it lists my hard drive. Does this mean that the main drive is running on this channel?

EDIT

I checked the other ones and have found my 2 CD drives on the other channel so I'm fairly sure it is my main drive running on PIO.

Now, how do I turn it off?

EDIT

Right, I just followed some instructions from a website. They said to uninstall the controller that was running in PIO mode from the device manager and reboot.

I did that and the PC is working perfectly now which I'm pleased about.

BUT there's something wrong still on the motherboard or maybe even the hard drive, I'm getting ATAPI and DISK errors every so often.

On another website I was told that after about 5 errors Windows changes you to PIO mode... this explains why my PC keeps doing this every few months.

What could be the most likely cause... hard drive or motherboard?

Craig.

Craig.
 
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