Heavy disk load during normal operation...

[amosf]

Hi,

This issue is bugging me for quite some time - My rig is A64 3000, 1GB, 6600GT AGP, NF3 250GB. I have one 200GB WD SATA HD and a 120GB WD PATA HD. Windows XP Pro is installed on the SATA drive.

The problem is that the HDs always feel busy, even if there's not much stress in the system. At first I thougt it was the page file, but looking the PF usage, showed it wasn't. It goes as far as that when I maximize a minimized window of Firefox, it actually get some time till it get done, while accessing the HD - and there's plenty of free RAM.

The worse part is when I'm moving large files from one HD to another (like a 10GB folder) - Then the system gets almost completley unresponsive.

I double checked DMA settings, and it looks fine (I'm running Nvidia IDE driver 2.6).

It was also the same when the SATA drive was the only drive in the system.

Any thoughts ????

Thanks.

 

[Calin]

Look at all the processes running in the system. Try some hard drive benchmarking tools (READ ONLY) to see if the results it gets are good.
Your file system is NTFS, isn't it?

 

[amosf]

Yep, it's NTFS. I ran the benchmarking tool incorporated in the Nvidia driver. Looks fine (SATA ~80MB/s, PATA - ~70MB/s).

Last night I used Diskeeper to update the MFT size - thought it might help. well, it didn't. Fragmentation is non-existing as well..... :|

 

[Calin]

Does the hard drive light flashes of it own from time to time (with the computer unused)? With 1GB of RAM, it shouldn't be

 

[amosf]

yeah, it actually does flash of it own sometime.