Incredibly low hard drive performance

[DougFrippon]

I have notice my computer has been really slow lately, and I do mean very.

For exemple I opened an Internet Explorer window while I had a mp3 playing and, the song was stoping/playing each 1sec... Also In a games whenever there is something to load, it becomes laggy as hell (2fps or so) but as soon was it was done loading stuff, it goes back to 70fps...

Well today I finnally found out what was causing it.. my hard-drive. I finnally have the explanation why my computer takes 2min to boot... So, I decided to run an HD-Tach bench on my hard-drive and here is the result I got.

http://pages.infinit.net/patdompe/hd-tach.JPG - red is me!
http://pages.infinit.net/patdompe/results.hdc [file to compare if you have hd-tach]

This is an IDE maxtor 160gb HD, not sure what brand I don't remember. Reason why I post here is because I have no idea what may be causing this, what do you guys thing?

 

[Pariah]

Assuming the drive is connected to the onboard IDE connectors, go to device manager and click on IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and then Primary IDE Channel. Click on the Advanced Settings tab and make sure that Device 0 has a Current Transfer Mode that is some Ultra DMA variation. Once again, assuming the drive is the master drive on the primary channel.

 

[DougFrippon]

http://pages.infinit.net/patdompe/pio.JPG

Seems like I'm in PIO but.. how do I change this, in the bios?

*EDIT*Went in my BIOS and everything is set to auto.. it says it's on DMA 6, which is UDMA133 I believe right now... Also my second hard drive on Primary Slave is running perfectly fine... with the exact same settings.

*RE-EDIT* I have a asus K8V, do I need to install via 4in1 or something like that maybe?

 

[Pariah]

Select PIO mode, close the dialog box, then go back and select DMA if available and reboot. If that doesn't fix it, try another IDE cable.

 

[Andres3605]

have you check the jumper settings?, try moving from cable select to master/slave or the other way around.

 

[DougFrippon]

Ok
-I checked the jumper is really set to Master.
-I also made sure the cables was correctly connected.
-I tried selected PIO and then DMA if available and then reboot

and it it still set to PIO..

I doubt my cable would be defect, because on Primary Slave I have another physical hard drive (a seagate) that works perfectly fine right now.

 

[Andres3605]

check the seagate and make sure is selected to slave, also try running the test with the maxtor by itself with the seagate unplug.

 

[Pariah]

One drive working is not an indication that there is nothing wrong with the cable. It could in fact be the combination of those 2 drives and that cable that is causing the problem. The transfer rate is auto-negotiated between each device and the controller at boot, if there is noise in the cable, or anything else is slightly amiss, the transfer rate will be dropped to PIO to maintain data integrity.

 

[lxskllr]

Go to control panel, system, hardware tab, device manager, open IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, right click on primary ide channel( or whichever your hd is on) select properties, advanced settings, using the dropdown box select dma if available.

Hope this helps

 

[Jiggz]

Is the IDE cable 80 wire? Go back to Device Manager and then go to the IDE Controller (Primary) and uncheck the option "Let Bios select Transfer Mode". Let us know if this helps.

 

[DougFrippon]

Yes it's a 80pin wire
I didn't find the "Let Bios select Transfer Mode" option
I unpluged my primary slave HD and it is still set to PIO

 

[DougFrippon]

installed a brand new HDD IDE cable, still set to PIO..

 

[DougFrippon]

went on asus website, all I saw was via 4in1 4.50, installed them with the IDE controler drivers.... still set to PIO mode.

From what I read here

""For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.

In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.

Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).

If the mini-IDE driver for the device does not support stepping down transfer modes, or if the device is running UDMA mode 0, Windows XP will step down to PIO mode after encountering six or more CRC errors. In this case, a system reboot should restore the original DMA mode settings.

All CRC and timeout errors are logged in the system event log. These types of errors could be caused by improper mounting or improper cabling (for example, 40-pin instead of 80-pin cable). Or such errors could indicate imminent hardware failure, for example, in a hard drive or chipset.
"

Seems like my harddrive must be broken... goddamnit :|

 

[TGS]

IIRC tools like sisandra have interface with the HDD software and check the amount of read/write errors counted on the disk.

I had a similiar problem though with a Raptor. I was getting around 2MB/s. I switched from using the SATA to SATA RAID drivers. Single disk RAID 0 (pointless, right? ) and it jumped up to the normal numbers. Possibly just a buggy driver I was using. At the time it was the lastest via driver though. The problem is, if yours is PATA I'm not sure. Check to see if you there is raid drivers for the PATA side of things. I know there are PATA > SATA convertors that came with my board, perhaps you should give that a try if you have one available.

 

[DougFrippon]

To whoever interested in knowing, I finnally got it to work.. I "uninstalled" my primary IDE controler, and rebooted. Hopefully it won't do it again or else it will mean my HD is broken and ... I bought it in May 2003 so it must not be covered anymore I suppose

 

[zephyrprime]

Be careful. Your HD could be broken. I know you've fixed the problem but I think your solution will only be temporary.

If there are data transmisson errors, Windows 2k/xp will drop you from DMA to PIO automatically. This sounds like it has happened in your case. Why do I believe this?
1. you were already set to DMA but you were nonetheless running in PIO
2. you were running a really slow PIO mode (maybe 0-1, not 4 or 5)
3. it used to work fine but then it didn't

Check the drive in Windows' storage manager. See if Windows thinks that the drive is "at risk". Also run Maxtor Diagnostics on the drive.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: DougFrippon
To whoever interested in knowing, I finnally got it to work.. I "uninstalled" my primary IDE controler, and rebooted. Hopefully it won't do it again or else it will mean my HD is broken and ... I bought it in May 2003 so it must not be covered anymore I suppose

My machine's done that before and nothing's wrong with the hard disk. Don't worry about it