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Need HDD help [fixed. no more help needed]

B

Bacinator

Senior member
SWG runs fine on my 2.2ghz AMD desktop.
SWG runs fine on my 1.5ghz Centrino Laptop.

On my desktop, whenever I switch tasks, like go from SWG to web browsing, or from any 'large' program to another, I get a severe amount of delay, apparently from my hard drive spinning to read and load the new files.

The laptop, takes a couple seconds to switch tasks, little to no delays.

What gives?

The primary HDD on my desktop is a 7200rpm, 160gb 8mb cache Maxtor, with 2 partitions. One is the C$, the other is D$, but is 100% empty. I have run windows drive error checker, Maxtors Powermax 4.09 error/HDD diagnostics utility, I have verified DMA is enabled on the IDE busses, and I have verified the cable being used is ATA133, and that the only device on IDE Bus 1 is that hard drive.

Laptop HDD has DMA enabled as well, is a 5400rpm, 60gb drive. Slower, but works better.

Both machines have 1GB of ram. Desktop running XP Pro SP2, Laptop running XP Home SP2.

Switching tasks is the only thing that seems to cause the massive delays. For example, starting SWG probably takes half as long as quitting SWG. 20 seconds or so to start, about 60 seconds to quit and reload the desktop.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm pondering picking up another SATA drive and just doing Raid0 for my C$, but I don't want to if I dont have to.
 
Well, you seem to have checked everything obvious. How about what else is running on the desktop? Have you checked to see if something is using up resources?

I would also run HDtach to see how the drive benches. You can compare it to the laptop drive in the bench and see if it's slow.

For comparison, my Maxtor 80gb drive benches at 84Mbs burst and 65/49/34 max/avg/min read speeds. CPU use is 7%.
 
What exactly is a "severe amount of delay"? Does this only occur when multitasking out of a resource intensive program? How much RAM do you have?
 
As it said in the original post, I have 1gb of ram.

I went ahead and picked up another 1gb stick, and everything works flawlessly now.

I find it amazing MMORPGs and Windows XP need MORE than 1gb to run laglessly. Wow.
 
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