Hard Drive Lagging, what is going on?

[bradsmith]

I have a WD 120GB that is lagging like you wouldn't believe.
This drive is used for storage only. It was working fine when I installed it. Then after 5 months the access time slowly increased. For example, to move/copy a single 15MB file from this drive to another physical drive would take 4-5 minutes. A 3MB file would take about a minute. I don't know about you, but that's not good times. Luckily POST is not taking any longer than it should. Unfortunately, Win2Kpro load time would take "too long."

Here are the stats:

FIC Mobo #AN17, ATA133, VIA KT333+8233A Chipset
AMD 1.466 MHz
256 DDR, 333MHz
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200
NIC 10/100 Dlink
Realtek Modem
1 52x CDrom
1 Plextor CD burner
1 3.5 flop
1 WD 40GB HD
1 WD 120 GB HD
Win2K Pro

The 120GB has 2 partitions, 90GB and 30GB (40GB and 20GB used)

Here is what I did so far:
1) Clean install Win2Kpro (with all necessary MS updates) on 40GB HD without 120GB "wired in" access times was how it should be in a fresh machine (without CAT5 plugged in)
2) Connected IDE and power cables to 120GB (without CAT5 plugged in) and access time changed to "lag city"

What is going on?

Of course, you can deduce it being a potentially failing HD. Is there anything I can do for now? Is there a magical file I can d/l to resolve this headache?

 

[Fencer128]

Hi,

Check that UDMA is enabled in the BIOS and for each controller, as listed in the device manager.

Check the IDE cable by swapping it for another one.

Download and use the western digital drive diagnostic program.

Backup everything valuable on that drive ASAP.

Good luck,

Andy

 

[cbehnken]

Check your event log and see if Windows is logging any bad sectors. I had a drive do the same thing.

 

[Cheetah8799]

And try to defrag it, maybe it'll help.

Maybe try plugging into another machine to get your data off and see if it's faster.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: Fencer128
Check that UDMA is enabled in the BIOS and for each controller, as listed in the device manager.

I'm willing to bet that this has something to do with it. For some unknown reason, UDMA is not enabled by default when you install Windows 2000.

 

[bradsmith]

OK, so it is working so far

This is what I tried:
1) Going into device manager and changing the ide controller to PIO only, restarting the computer. Then changing to DMA if available, restarting again.

No Luck

2) Uninstalling the affected IDE controller driver and restarting.

This worked, so far

I was about to change some registry settings if that uninstalling the driver didn't work. Alright then. ..

Thank you all for your quick responses

Until next crisis. . .