Sloooow to initially open partition on SATA drive

riddlermarc · 23 Nov 2006 at 21:38

I've just had to re-install XP, I have installed the relevant drivers from the mobo cd as per usual. However, the 200Gb SATA drive I have as my f: drive can take up to ten seconds to open up within explorer.. is this something I should worry about? In device manager it is showing up as a SCSI disk, despite it not being so and I'm sure it didn't previously show up as one. I did delete it from device manager and reboot but it just re-read it as a SCSI drive.. anything I can do or do you think the drive may be a little b0rked?

riddlermarc · 24 Nov 2006 at 07:40

Hmm, a quick look this morning and I noticed in Task Manager that the relevant explorer.exe process shoots up to 60% cpu usage when I try to access the f: drive, lasting until the contents appear after a few seconds and then the process drops back to 0% :confused:

rpstewart · 24 Nov 2006 at 09:23

Can you try rinning HDTach on the drive, with that sort of CPU usage it could be that the drive is running in PIO mode.

Do you have the drive connected to a SATA port that's driven by a third party controller (Silicon Image etc)?

riddlermarc · 24 Nov 2006 at 09:52

rpstewart said:
Can you try rinning HDTach on the drive, with that sort of CPU usage it could be that the drive is running in PIO mode.

Do you have the drive connected to a SATA port that's driven by a third party controller (Silicon Image etc)?

Okay, I just ran it and came up with the following results:

How can I check it's running in PIO mode? I think XP is thinking it is a SCSI drive, due to it being connected to the (onboard) ULi SATA/RAID (M1573) controller via the bios (the bios is set to AHCI, not RAID though).. ? I'm sure it didn't come up as a SCSI drive before I reinstalled XP though..

Is it worth me deleting the RAIS/SCSI controller and the hdd from Device Manager and then rebooting to see if it corrects itself?

Thanks for the help