Poor hard drive performance - any ideas?

gbdtil1

gbdtil1

gbdtil1

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Joined
24 Mar 2006
Posts
219
Hi all,

recently encountered some problems with my Samsung F1 spinpoint 750 gig HDD. Specifically, very slow load into Windows XP (about 2.5 mins) and when in Windows, my game load times have increased dramatically - here, to the extent that my mates system (inferior in every aspect) has finished loading COD6 and I'm still languishing at about 20% load.

I generally run a light and clean system, ie very little in start up, defrag every now and then, have run registry mechanic, CCleaner and some other registry cleaner (all the free versions - so accepted limited!) but no difference.

If I think back to when the problems started to arise it would've coincided with me adding additional hard drives to the system. One with Vista, one with Windows 7 but these are all run independently and only accessed via bios boot preference. I have since disabled (totally unplugged) the 2 other drives and there is no change in performance.

I run NOD32 antivirus and nothing detected there.

Grateful for any views / help

Cheers ;)
 
gbdtil1 said:
how do you do that? Is there a utility to check it?
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open a command prompt

start --> run --> type "cmd" without the quotes and press enter

in the cmd box type "chkdsk C: /f" if the drive letter is C and dont use the quotes. You will have to resart the system.

A chkdsk will take place on re-boot - look for messages like "made correctinos to the file system".

I would also down a utility from Seagate called seatools and run a long generic test on the drive.
 
Could it be your hardware feeling bad regarding your FPS playing style? Ive heard rumours that people who camp and stand behind barrels etc, their hardrives slow down? :)

Sounds like your friend may have lower spec hardware but still shows you how to play the game?? that's how it looks anyway.
 
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I recently had this happen. Your hdd should be in Ultra DMA mode. Check under control panel/system/device manager/IDE ata controllers that windows hasn't forced your drive into PIO mode. If it is in PIO mode you can edit the registry to restore DMA by doing the following...
Run regedit.
Go to the following key:
Code: 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

It has subkeys like 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. Normally 0001 is the primary IDE channel, 0002 the secondary, but other numbers can occur under certain circumstances. You have to go through these subkeys and check the DriverDesc value until you find the proper IDE channel.

Delete MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveIdDataChecksum, depending on whether the device in question is attached as master or slave, but it can't actually hurt to delete both. Reboot. The drive DMA capabilities will be redetected.

Note that many CD and DVD drives only use UDMA-2, because their data rate is much lower than that of a hard disk. This is normal and no reason to worry.

2006-01-19 – Horst Schülke wrote that it is sufficient to empty the content of these values. But you can also delete the values entirely. Windows will automatically recreate them anyway, with new content.

Open Device Manager again and check whether the device is now actually using DMA mode. If so, congratulations, you've made it (at least until the next time Windows disables DMA). If not, you may have to change the IDE channel setting from PIO back to the highest available DMA mode and reboot again.
Click to expand...

Worked for me in Win XP. Win 7 shouldn't be a lot different but backup your registry before you edit it.

Source; http://winhlp.com/node/10
 
gbdtil1 said:
TLH - Not sure if you'll pick this up but many thanks fella. Your remedy worked a treat. Got my hard drive back :) Cheers mate ;)
Click to expand...


If you drive is set to PIO mode this is usually done with Windows after 6 failled attempts to read data. I would check the drive for integrity using the seatools app I mentioned.
 
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