SATAII HDD seems very slow

yfas29 · 6 Mar 2007 at 01:11

Hi all

I've just built myself a Media center PC and fitted an old Samsung 160gb SATAII hard drive. However when copying files from one partition to another it seems very slow. For example a 1 gig video file is currently taking about 6 mins to transfer. Is this normal?

Cheers in advance

Cupra · 6 Mar 2007 at 01:37

is the drive whining at all?

yfas29 · 6 Mar 2007 at 01:44

paul_64l said:
is the drive whining at all?

No not at all. It just seems very slow.

Subliminal Aura · 6 Mar 2007 at 01:46

Have you downloaded and installed all the chipset drivers(if needed) for the motherboard ?

yfas29 · 6 Mar 2007 at 02:06

Subliminal Aura said:
Have you downloaded and installed all the chipset drivers(if needed) for the motherboard ?

Hi, Yes all the latest drivers are installed.

Subliminal Aura · 6 Mar 2007 at 02:45

How long does it take to copy and paste the file on the SAME partition ?

You might want to try to see how long it takes to copy the file to an external firewire / usb2 drive or better still if you have a spare HD stick that in the copy and see how it performs.

Try also taking off your overclocking (if any )and doing things @ stock maybe.

rpstewart · 6 Mar 2007 at 08:47

yfas29 said:
Hi all

I've just built myself a Media center PC and fitted an old Samsung 160gb SATAII hard drive. However when copying files from one partition to another it seems very slow. For example a 1 gig video file is currently taking about 6 mins to transfer. Is this normal?

Cheers in advance

If you only have a single physical disk then copying anything about isn't going to be particularly quick because the drive heads have to continually move between the source and target locations but 6 mins seems a touch excessive.

It's difficult to know precisely what's going on without some more details but a first port of call would be to run an HDTach benchmark and make sure that the drive is at least reading at a sensible speed.

6mins per Gb is about 2.7Mb/s, the drive could well be running in PIO mode - is the CPU usage high when you're doing the copy?