IDE cable crosstalk symptoms...

[Endarkened]

I've got a 40GB IBM 60GXP Deskstar 7200RPM hdd that has been giving me some minor troubles for a while. Whenever it's been on for a few hours, it becomes extremely slow when trying to perform certain tasks. It almost always occurs if I've been moving around in folders in My Documents. It will sometimes take up to 30 seconds just to open a folder or move "Back" or "Forward" between folders. This only happens after it's been on for a while, and I'm meticulous about how I care for my pc (regularly scandisking and defragging). Which brings up another, related symptom. I do a lot of video editing, and whenever I've deleted a large amount of video files (a few gigs or so), I run scandisk and it will always find that my hard drive was reporting the free disk space incorrectly: Is this normal? The only thing I could think of that might be causing something like this is crosstalk within my IDE cable, though I don't really know what the symptoms of crosstalk are. I just know that people sometimes avoid rounded cables for fear of crosstalk, and the cables I'm using are flat ones that I've rounded following the guide found here, which doesn't require any cutting. So, if anyone has any insight they could share concerning my troubles, it would be gretly appreciated.

-Endarkened

 

[Odoacer]

Well, you might want to stop defragging, because defragging can actually slow down your hard drive.... even more so if you do video editing because it jumbles everything around and you're always writing/deleting.

 

[Yossarian]

What are you talking about Odoacer? Defragging does the opposite of what you wrote. I don't see how it could slow down a HD.

 

[tomrizzo]

what about the lastest drivers or board bios, is it the integrated ide controller, i had problems like that with a built in promise chip, on an asus a7v.

 

[Mday]

Your problem is not from crosstalk. The symptoms of crosstalk is generally slowed data transfer speeds which is not indicative of what you are describing. Intense crosstalk will result in data corruption, crosstalk is only interference...

so one thing at a time...

the free disk space thing: since you delete and create files (or modify) so often, windows will most likely be wondering wtf is going on. If you are running win98 on fat32, this is a known bug which does not cause data corruption but is annoying. NTFS would know better if you are running NT or whatnot.

Scandisk and defrag should not be run all the time, use them on a weekly basis is often enough. defrag will wear down your HDD, but its nothing really. NTFS will actually minimize the problems, if you use NT.

Man it's like i am doing a commercial for NT. anyway, if you do video editting for real, the NT kernel is really the way to go.

--

now for your problems, uh, what do you have running when you move around between folders? if you are encoding or compressing a
video file, that is normal behavior since the computer is juggling tasks. if your computer is doing nothing while you are moving between folders, something is terribly wrong.

If you have a singular HDD for video editting, I will say that it is a very stupid thing to do. Its like not having a spare tire for a car. If you have a singular partition, it is also foolish.

Since you say that the problem only occurs after your system has been on for a while, I assume you do some video editting, and other things, then move around between folders and stuff. Well, your symptoms make me think of the programs you use or windows itself not releasing memory after programs that used the space are no longer running. This problem you can only fix using other software programs or an alternate operating system. A reboot usually solves it since it purges the memory. A reboot won't kill you...

--

without knowing more, I have pretty much concluded that this is NOT A HARDWARE, but a software issue. Of course if something else is happening it may very well be a hardware problem, but I highly doubt it.

 

[PliotronX]

I noticed in your Rig page, it lists your OS as Win98. Can you get either Win2k or XP by any chance? Win98's memory management is horrible.

 

[kgraeme]

I get the same thing. It's obviously a memory corruption problem. It usually happens for me when moving in and out of lots of directories with lots of files, and especially when I have my PocketPC synched and mounted as a device. After browsing through it's folders my system always begins to lag.

That was with 98.

 

[Endarkened]

First off, thanks everyone for all the helpful replies. It looks like I'm gonna have to axe the Win 98 and throw a different OS in there. Is XP Pro known to have any problems with video editing/gaming (what I mostly use my system for), or should I go with 2000?

BTW, Mday: The problem is a lot like kgraeme described. Even if I haven't been running any programs except for Internet, it will still become horribly slow after a few hours when moving between directories (without anything running in the background). Yeah, I know it's foolish to only be running one hdd with video editing, but I'm a starving college student . This summer I'll look into adding a 100 gig+ and a controller card.

Thanks again,

Endarkened

 

[billyjak]

It sounds more like a ram issue to me, running low to quickly.
Try putting ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in the system Ini under [386Enh] section

 

[Mday]

XP is still a fairly new operating system. do not expect your programs to work on XP despite the existence of win98 compatibility mode.

And then there are hardware issues such as drivers.

 

[stevewm]

The problem is not your hardrive but a bug in 9x based OSes. When moving in/out of system folders like My Documents a new registry stream is created (streams are actually just keys in the registry that hold folder view info) moving in and out of system directories causes multiple copies of these keys to be created and when they amount to 250 (the max limit) everything slows down.

To fix it you can open the file desktop.ini in your My Documents folder with notepad, delete its contents, then save.

Or just stop using the My Documents folder.

Here are a few Usenet posts on this issue: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=win98%20my%20documents%20slow&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&sa=N&tab=wg