Poor Disk Performance?

[GimpyFuzznut]

I've been having some trouble with a hard drive in my new system. Its a new drive as well - Western Digital WD3200AAKS-00SBA0, 315GB.

My system is as follows;
E4300 @ 3.0GHz
Gigabyte DS3
2Gb DDR1066
Asus Radeon 1950 Pro
Creative X-Fi

I have the hard drive plugged into the orange/yellow connector of the DS3 which I believe is the Intel SATA controller. I also played around with the BIOS settings for the DS3 and configured the drives as indicated in this guide;
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1169366
(basically put SATA Native Mode on)


Unfortunately I have experienced very poor performance with this drive and I'm not sure what is causing the problem. For example, copying files from the network onto this drive will cause the entire system to slow down. The copying process also takes much longer than usual. If I have Media Center open watching videos - while the drive is having files being copied to it, the video becomes extremely choppy and almost unwatchable. Not exactly the performance I'm used to considering watching video and copying files wasn't much of a hassle for my old P4 system. I also have the drive partitioned into 2 (was going to install Vista). Copying a 50 meg file from one partition to another takes almost a minute! Shouldn't it take a second?! I've also noticed starting Windows takes longer than usually for what should be a really fast system. What the hell is going on here?

I've tried running diagnostics on the drive. Western Digital and Seagate Tools - nothing came up. SMART diagnostic said the drive was fine. I ran chkdsk and nothing came up. I defragged the drive and it didn't help. I disabled indexing service. I also disable write caching. So what could be the problem?

 

[cdfire]

I had issues with files opening real slow and the pc, after a short period of time would slow to craw. Turned out to be a software issue with something on the creative x-fi disk being the issue. After un-installing most of the creative software, the issues all went away. May want to give that a try. Hope that helps.

 

[GimpyFuzznut]

I'll give that a try. Never had issues with the Creative drivers before however - don't have any of the software installed, just the drivers. Any other ideas?

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

try running HD tune...see what that gets you compared to other drives you might have in the same system.

also, have a look in your event viewer to see if you are getting any strange Disk errors.

 

[GimpyFuzznut]

I had this all over my event viewer -
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

I tried updating the chipset drivers for the P965 and I don't think it helped. I moved the hard drive from the Intel controller to the Gigabyte one and it seemed to have solved the problem. Not really the best solution but OK for now I guess.