SATA problem??

chowks · 14 Mar 2008 at 23:14

Hi,

I recently built a new PC including a new Abit IP35 pro motherboard....everything seemed to be running fine until the computer seemed to be running VERY slow, with the HD constantly whirring. I thought my HD was on the way to death so i bought a new one (A Samsung Spinpoint 500gb) which is also SATA. When i installed the new windows on it, i noticed that my dvd drive was also running slowly and weirdly which got me thinking it could be a motherboard problem as it is also connected via SATA.

After a week or 2 the new HD also seems to be acting up. It will load windows....then windows tells me my BitDefender antivirus has been switched off (happens a lot and then disappears) and then it just seems to freeze......or run incredibly slowly at best.....just not responding to anything i do.

Now i've connected up the old HD and it runs but still a bit slow.

Could this be a problem with the motherboard? All the drivers are up to date.

cheers for any help lads.

BUFF · 15 Mar 2008 at 08:34

sure that you don't have a virus?
can you check CPU utilisation?

edgedemon · 15 Mar 2008 at 08:38

Check your task manager to see what services are hogging resources. If there are any that you are not sure on, or you don't recognise, google them to see what they are - this should give you a clue

chowks · 15 Mar 2008 at 16:57

cheers for the advice.

I looked at the task manager and noticed that there were 8 processes called svchost.exe with some being SYSTEM, some NETWORK SERVICE and one LOCAL SERVICE.

one of the svchost.exe processes was using 467,720 K of memory.....is this normal?

I did a virus scan and apparantly the computer is clean.

Ceryndrion · 15 Mar 2008 at 17:34

There is also a possibility that this is due to an incompatibility between SATA Optical drives, and the AHCI interface.. have a look in the bios to see if AHCI mode is enabled, or if the interface is in IDE mode.

What you would need to do, is make sure the optical drive is on the secondary interface (there is one on most ip35 boards, usually denoted by a different colour header), then you should be able to switch the main interface up to AHCI mode, and get full speed.. however, this comes at a cost, if you don't first make a small registry change in windows, it will bsod on boot as the ahci driver is disabled by default (great thinking microsoft), I think there's another thread around here somewhere that explains the change you would need to make.