Major Hard disk slowdown!

[elzmaddy]

Update: please see my post below

Recently I've noticed a considerable slowdown when creating partition images with Norton Ghost 2003. Every few days I try to do a partition dump from my Maxtor's Windows XP partition to its data partition. I remember that 10GB transfer normally it would not take more than 25 minutes or so -- On the last partition dump, it took about 2 hours.

I have the Maxtor 80GB drive on its own cable on the Primary1 IDE controller. I have a new SeaGate 120GB ATA V (parallel interface) plugged into my board's RAID/UltraATA controller. Both drives have two partitions. From Seagate's Partition 1 --> SeaGate's Partition 2 I am getting 63MB/min. From Maxtor's partition 1 --> Seagate's partition 1 I am getting 124MB/min. Maxtor Partition 1 --> Maxtor Partition 2, is as described above, also very slow. Normally I should be getting 500MB/Min.

I went into the BIOS and turned off S.M.A.R.T., no difference. Disk settings in BIOS are on auto. Only changes, I got a new power supply recnetly and I did reset BIOS to fail-safe defaults at one point.

It isn't the Ghost program because Maxtor MaxBlast is also giving me a slow 100MB/sec transfer rate. The problem doesn't seem to be an individual drive. Could my board be failing? I appreciate any suggestions.

 

[elzmaddy]

I moved the hard disks apart from each other, but no difference, so it is not a heat issue.

 

[FishTankX]

Try elminating your temporary internet files. If the harddrive spends most of it's time jumping between files, it doesn't matter how high the transfer rate is, it'll be bottlenecked by seekrate.

Example: If you have a seektime of 13ms you can access about 100 files per second. That would mean that if your average file is 50K, that's 5MB/s.

If it's not that, check your DMA.

 

[elzmaddy]

Yes, I am trying to find out if the drives are in ATA100 mode. Unfortunately SeaGate's utility does not support my model.

Is there a utility that can verify what mode any brand of hard drive is in?

 

[FishTankX]

I believe you can find that inside Windows's hardware manager. Check the properties of the Drive controllers. There should be primary and secondary. Find out which chain it's on and locate the respective drive. It should show you an "Ultra DMA X (X meaning whatever number it is) " mode.

 

[elzmaddy]

Hmmm... Seagate utility is giving me these specs regarding my first drive:

MW DMA Support: 0, 1, 2
MW DMA Cycle Time 120 ns
UltraDMA support 0,1,2,3,4,5
MW DMA Active 2
Min Cycle/Word 120ns
UltraDMA Active None

Doesn't that last line indicate it is disabled??

 

[zephyrprime]

DMA mode 2 is only 16.6 MB/s. Something is definately wrong with your hardware but I can't tell if it's the drives or the MB. You should download and run a program called ActiveSmart so you can get detailed information about your HD's smart status. Also, go into the storage management console in XP and see if your drives are marked "At Risk" or otherwise unhealthy. Download and run the diagnostics programs from Maxtor and Seagate. Your Barracuda V should be ~22% faster than your Maxtor 80, not slower. You might want to try different cables too. Different cables fixed a problem my friend was having just last week.

Check your bios and make sure that it's set to auto detect your various hard drive settings.

 

[elzmaddy]

Update: I plugged the drives into a different system. Drive to drive transfer is an average 960MB/Min! And they were even chained on the same IDE channel! Obviously there is something wrong with my system. I moved the drives to the original system, plugged into a different RAID port which I had not tried yet. Now I am getting 660MB/min average, which is acceptable to me. So what does this mean -- my main IDE interface is failing? The thing is, all transfers would end up okay despite being so slow... how could it have "slowed down"?? And should I accept this, or get a new board? Thanks to everyone for the input.

 

[mechBgon]

How about manually setting the controllers to UltraDMA mode, in Windows Device Management? If you haven't tried that already, that would be a good idea.

 

[zephyrprime]

How about manually setting the controllers to UltraDMA mode, in Windows Device Management? If you haven't tried that already, that would be a good idea.

They're already in dma mode but not in ultradma mode. Windows doesn't have specific settings to allow you to set which dma mode you want.