Adding a 3rd Hard Drive

[dimez]

I added a 3rd 40gig WD hard drive, took it from the old computer (no formating) and set jumpers as Dual Slave, once I start working with data from that hard drive, everything is slowing down significantly, so I wonter is it due to wrong jumper settings, unformated hard drive that still has win xp from old compuer, or something else?

 

[Algere]

Is it sharing the same (E)IDE cable with the main drive?

 

[dimez]

Its sharing IDE with cd rom, there are 2 other hard drive on main IDE

 

[Algere]

I'm gonna ask a stupid question that you probably might've done already.

Did you defrag your drives or used scan disk to check for errors?

 

[dimez]

yeah, i defreged them, changed them from fat32 to ntfs, didn't help

 

[Smilin]

If you've added the drive to the same controller that holds your OS and pagefile you may notice a performance drop while doing heavy work on that drive. Any read/writes will tie up that controller and slow down paging and OS access.

If it seems particularly bad check and see if you are getting any delayed write failures or other errors on the drive. Could be something up with the disk.

 

[Cheetah8799]

My recent experience with a similar situation:

I had my 120gb Seagate drive on the same channel as my dvd burner with an ATA100 cable. Should have been fine, but wasn't. hd was master, dvdrw was slave. I think the hd was NOT in dma mode. Not sure though. But once I moved the hd to the primary channel, and the dvdrw alone on the secondary, and set both to cable select, it worked much faster, as it should.

Keep in mind I have an extra PCI raid controller for my main 2 hard drives that are set in RAID 0.

Anyway, point is that maybe having the 3rd hd and the cdrw on teh same channel is causing the hd to not run with dma on. I'm no expert in this area, but I hear the whole "turn dma on" suggestion a lot, so I figure it may have been an issue with my rig. I couldn't find the setting in XP though, so am not sure... You should try unplugging your cdrw drive so the 3rd hd runs by itself on the secondary channel, then see how it goes.

 

[jbritt1234]

Originally posted by: Cheetah8799
You should try unplugging your cdrw drive so the 3rd hd runs by itself on the secondary channel, then see how it goes.

Good suggestion. Give that a try.

 

[Zepper]

What transfer mode can that CD ROM drive handle. If it can't do at least UDMA33, then that may be your problem. A PIO drive will bog down the whole channel. If you need to get that CD-ROM drive off the channel, I recommend a Silicon Image based controller card (e.g. the Syba RAID card from dealsonic.com et al.) The Syba will provide two additional channels (4 more drives max), but if you only need three channels, you can disable one of the integrated channels on the mobo in the BIOS to free up an IRQ.
.bh.

 

[Delorian]

Originally posted by: jbritt1234

Originally posted by: Cheetah8799
You should try unplugging your cdrw drive so the 3rd hd runs by itself on the secondary channel, then see how it goes.

Good suggestion. Give that a try.

Yeah, I would definitely try that as I've heard the only reason to put a HD on the same channel as an optical drive is for the need for extra storage space overwhelming the need for speed. IIRC the CD-ROM being on the same channel as an HD drops performance significantly for that whole channel. I've tried this myself noticing little difference but If possible I always stay with my HDs on one channel and opticals on another. If you are really concerned about your performance, I would simply leave only rarely accessed long-term storage files on the secondary channel drive hoping that the drive isn't used very often. Else just remove your 3rd drive and just use the best 2 you have.

BTW, what exactly do you mean "Dual Slave", I simply assumed you meant Secondary. Also, I would put jumper(s) at Channel Select and try setting autodetect for the 3rd HD in your cmos settings to ensure your configuration is correct, generally if they aren't correct the first time, the drive will simply not work, but this is not always the case.