Why is my drive so slow:(

Messiah Khan · 20 May 2006 at 15:01

Ive just installed HDtach, and ran tests on my drives. All my drives are fine except my program drive which has this terrible result;

Any idea why? Its connected to the Nvidia SATA controller on my MSI K8N.

Mikey1280 · 20 May 2006 at 15:08

Eeeeew my flash disk gets better than that. Have you installed the chipset drivers or any needed sata drivers?

Messiah Khan · 20 May 2006 at 15:10

All the drivers are fine. The other drives connected to the exact same controller are perfectly fine. Ive noticed though that the CPU utilization is very high when im running the test on that drive. Any idea what could cause this?

Messiah Khan · 20 May 2006 at 15:28

Never mind, ive fixed it now. The drive was stuck in PIO mode for some reason. I wonder how long its been like that, lol. Anyway, this is whats its like now;

Zuma · 20 May 2006 at 21:04

my hd has exactly the same problem, inc high cpu usage etc. only it's just a normal ata drive.
but i don't know what to do to fix it. can someone point me in the right direction please?

cheers
Z

Zuma · 20 May 2006 at 21:20

ok after doing a bit of searching myself, i see that sometimes windows XP reduces the transfer mode if it gets a series of errors on the drive over time. but it doesn't put the transfer mode back up.
which does make me think that i may also have a HD problem. it's a pretty old drive, and i recently changed motherboard and chip cos my pc appeared to die (maybe it really did)
but then on fitting new hardware and reinstalling xp, the performance has gradually reduced day on day, over the last few days to the point where it takes a couple of mins to boot into windows.

Messiah Khan · 20 May 2006 at 21:23

Go into Control panel>Administrative tools>Computer management>Device manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Double click on the controller the drive is attatched to, go to the Primary or secondary channel tab depending on which your drive is attatched to. Select the correct transfer mode from the dropdown box(Choose the highest it will let you.)

Edit; What drive is it? What is the SMART status of it saying?(Check in something like speedfan)

Zuma · 20 May 2006 at 22:28

messiah khan said:
Go into Control panel>Administrative tools>Computer management>Device manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Double click on the controller the drive is attatched to, go to the Primary or secondary channel tab depending on which your drive is attatched to. Select the correct transfer mode from the dropdown box(Choose the highest it will let you.)

Edit; What drive is it? What is the SMART status of it saying?(Check in something like speedfan)

the problem i had is that windows didn;t let me change the transfer mode. it was locked at pio. however i found this page (among others) that helped me out.
http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/
although i reckon my hd is on the way out and producing errors which made XP reduce the speed in the first place. It's just an old Maxtor 40Gig drive. need to get a new one anyway

cheers

TooNice · 21 May 2006 at 00:05

The Sil3132 controller on the A8R32 seems to have that problem too:
http://img267.imageshack.us/my.php?image=burst4dh.png

Notice the low CPU usage, it is definitely not in PIO mode.

Messiah Khan · 21 May 2006 at 01:13

Ouch, thats on a Raptor as well isn't it?

aardvark · 21 May 2006 at 20:31

i had a problem like this about a month ago, with the drive speed locked at 10mb/s - i rang up seagate and ended up sending it back and getting a replacement.
i wonder if this would have fixed it? hmmm.... oh well, not important anymore.