Hard Drive copy very slow??

[dannylu88]

hi guys i recently bought 500 gb hitachi sata hd... but it copies very slow, anybody have any ideas....


i copy the same exact file to my other 3 hard drives and all of them copies faster and transfer faster than my 500 gb hitachi


Thanks

 

[furballi]

Download HDtune and run the speed test. Check the CPU load during the test.

 

[dannylu88]

heres the test i ran with hdtach... im doing the hdtune rite now

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dannylu/images/screen.jpg http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dannylu/images/screen.jpg

yeah im getting 3.6 meg/sec consistently

 

[spikespiegal]

Average read 3.8mbs....uh yeah,...there's a problem there.

 

[dannylu88]

just finished the hdtune.

same results

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dannylu/images/screen2.bmp

 

[w00t]

There's a problem post your system specs please.

 

[dannylu88]

Pentium 4 3.4 Hyper THreading 800 FSB
1.5 Gig DDr2 Ram
1650 GB HD Space
Creative Soundblaster Audigy Zs2
ATI Radeon X800XT 256 DDR3
Logitech Sound System W/ Subwoofer
Logitech Wireless KEyboard Mouse MX
Dell LCD TV/Monitor
350 power

its a dell 8400

 

[modedepe]

Have you checked in BIOS to make sure the transfer mode is set to DMA (as opposed to PIO)?

 

[dannylu88]

nope... sounds good ill try it

 

[dannylu88]

sorry this is a newb question but is the bios the same thing as system startup?

 

[HybridSquirrel]

hit delete as you reboot your computer. spam it like no other and your in bios

 

[dannylu88]

i dont know if this matters or not but, my secondary ide channel is using pio mode to transfer.... does that matter.... it isnt giving me an option to change it to dma

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: dannylu88
i dont know if this matters or not but, my secondary ide channel is using pio mode to transfer.... does that matter.... it isnt giving me an option to change it to dma

Yep, that's certainly a problem, and you could sort of predict this from the transfer rate and the CPU utilization (assuming that you're looking at the right channel and device).

Check the BIOS in case it is (a) somehow set to PIO for this channel (b) not recognizing this drive properly (guessing -- maybe need a BIOS / MB driver update for a 500 GB drive?).

Sometimes, when drives give errors, the OS will down-shift to PIO mode automatically. You could try uninstalling the IDE controller driver (don't worry, it'll auto-reinstall it) to reset the options. There's more on this in MS support, but I'm not sure if it'll help.

Sometimes the OS doesn't report the correct transfer mode (well, at least for older versions). For this, you could try downloading and installing SisSoft Sandra and running its ATA/ATAPI diagnostic utility.

 

[furballi]

Set BIOS to AUTO detect the hard drives and optical drives. Save and exit. Go into Device Manager and delete ALL ITEMS under IDE controllers. Reboot PC. Recheck IDE controllers to make sure all devices are set to AUTO detect and are running in DMA mode.

 

[dannylu88]

are the sata under ide channels also ??

 

[dannylu88]

i also have checked the bios on my system... but since its a dell it seems as if the bios is very limited and there are no options for me to change it or check to see if its dma or pio

 

[dannylu88]

thank you very much everybody... i deleted the secondary channel and rebooted it reinstalled itself and now it transfer at like 60 .... thanks for all your help

 

[furballi]

No problem. Common problem with DELL PCs.