strange issue with my hdd

ih8modem

ih8modem

ih8modem

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Joined
20 Dec 2004
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623
I have windows xp and vista 32 on two different hard disks in my machine.

When I boot xp, the primary drive is a WD6400AAKS.

When I boot Vista, then the primary is a Samsung F1 1TB.

Now sometimes in XP, I get 2-3mb/sec (yes thats very very slow) from the 640GB. When I boot into Vista, HDtune never ever gives under 100mb/sec on average for the same drive.

Is it possible there is something grabbing this hdd and locking it, so that it slows to a crawl? When I check the CPU usage, I'm 99% idle and 1 % on svchost. All 4 cores hardly show a green line in perfmon.

I checked the hardware device in device manager, it is still reporting as UDMA-6 - SATA2, so its not windows thats killed the drive by forcing it to PIO mode.

Any ideas what it could be ?
 
TaLLyJ said:
I would have assumed it had something to do with PIO mode myself... have you checked that its not enabled ?
Click to expand...

Just double checked, it is in ULTRA DMA-6 mode.

Grrr this is frustrating. I have now changed out the SATA cable, and also move the drive to another port on the controller. Same thing.

I then moved the drive to the other controller (not the ICH controller, but the SI one). Same thing.

Other drives on the same machine all report as expected, my 250GB is giving 61MB/sec and the Samsung F1 is 110MB/sec

It's defnitely like something is using the drive. A reboot and it works fine for a while, then slows down again. Mostly it slows down if I leave it alone for a while, almost as if Norton 360 is running a background scan.
 
in fact thats exactly what it is !

Damn - I answered my own question. It was actually a background scan from Norton 360 running. While trying to diagnose the issue this morning, a message popped up to say virus and spyware scan complete, and suddenly the speed is back over 100MB/sec.

GRRRRRR @ Symantec.
 
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