Well this isn't right

n1kunj

n1kunj

n1kunj

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Surrey
I spotted I had HDtune installed on my system and decided to give it a run. Results were fine on my 500GB WD 5000AAKS but on my older Maxtor IDE drive (Maxline III) I got this funny pattern: seems my drive is capped at 30mb/s - I know it can go faster as I remember running it a while back, and no HDD pattern is completely straight. Ignore CPU usage, as I ran the test twice and it came up with a completely different value the next time so I think it's bugged - HD tach shows CPU usage as V. low as well.

hdtunemaxoj4.jpg


I tries HD Tach to see if the problem was the same, it was indeed. Notice burst is also capped at 30mb/s.

hdtachmaxdn7.jpg


I can't say I'm too bothered about this - I was planning on upgrading the Maxtor to another 500GB drive because I'm running out of space, it's a real stretch for me to get both the DVD drive and HDD on the same IDE cable (my god I hate those things) and it's mucking up my neat and tidy case, plus I've heard some horror stories about Maxtor reliability.

The error scan is completely fine in HD Tune and other than "Reallocated Sector Count" being yellow under Health ( I don't know what that means!) but still saying OK under status it's completely fine. It is an old drive though - power on time says 21406 (hours?) and I've had it for many years now (3-4 I think)

Do people think it could be an OS issue or is my HDD slowly dying? It isn't clicking or anything, and I've experienced no corruption of files - in fact I'd never have noticed the problem if it weren't for the benchmarking tools as it's just a storage drive - I don't run anything off of it.
 
I think it may have to do with the devices, HD and cd or DVD being IDE and running them on the same cable may be the culprit I always used to, past tense run them on seperate ide cables, ie one cable for the hard drive, one cable for the dvd,cd drives, think this be your problem.

correct me if iam wrong.
 
Even if that is true there's nothing I can do about it as my mobo only has one IDE slot :( Unless it has something to do with the jumper placements, although I don't see how a wrong jumper would restrict the speed, it would either make it work or not work correct?
 
Only 1 device can be active on an IDE channel at a time and some DVD drives have a habit of "hogging" things so to speak, hence you'll have decreaesd performance on the HD.

If you only have 1 IDE slot I'd wager you have some SATA connections on your MOBO, for your next hard drive, get a SATA one and all should be good.
 
goto control panel, system, get device manager up, scroll down to hard drives click the + then move your mouse over the maxter symbol then right click , select properties to see if dma is enable, I think its DMA your looking for if its unticked then select it u may have to reboot for it to take effect. that should cure the problem,

also standard hard drives should run on average at 55 mb's transfer or less if a laptop hard drive if greater then 2 years old etc.

hope this helps, keep posted.
 
DMA is already ticked in both the Primary and Secondary IDE channels. I'll try unplugging my DVD drive and seeing if that makes a difference though.
 
It may be ticked but is it running in DMA mode?
it will tell you in devicemanager.
Either way it may be worth reinstalling the Primary IDE controller.
 
LizardKing said:
It may be ticked but is it running in DMA mode?
it will tell you in devicemanager.
Either way it may be worth reinstalling the Primary IDE controller.
Click to expand...

I unplugged the DVD drive and still get the same problem... Hmm...

dmamz8.jpg


Both channels have Ultra DMA enabled

I also found this link. - Same problem it seems, but completely different circumstances and HDD and just about everything else. Tis an SCSI HDD too on a raid controller. Perfectly straight line, they say, like mine.
 
Last edited:
*Checks*

Nope, deffo an ata/66 cable.

I also updated my chipset drivers (no mention of a specific IDE driver on the Gigabyte website so I assume there either isn't one or the chipset drivers cover it.

Not to worry if I can't sort the problem, I'd have never noticed it if I hadn't run the test and I don't even need near 30mb/s read speed for a storage drive :)
 
I had the same thing when connecting a hard drive while the PC was on, it got detected at a lower dma mode but after a reboot it was detected properly and the speed increased.
 
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