poor performance with a new drive?

[pocketExistentialist]

I just bought a Seagate Barracuda V ATA 120 GB hard drive, and I did a clean install of Win2k pro onto it. Then, I copied over my files from my 75GXP and then retired it. However, the Seagate seems to perform significantly worse than the IBM, and this really rears its ugly head when multitasking. For example, I can't do anything while installing a program; windows gets completely unresponsive, and develops a 10 second latency between when I click on something and when it responds. Basically, I can't multitask with anything that involves accessing the disk for an extended period of time. The drive is in Ultra DMA mode, and it is the only drive on the primary channel. Any help would be appreciated.

The drive is partitioned into C: (12 GB, OS and Applications), D: (24 GB, Games), and E: (76 GB, everything else). My other IDE devices are a Pioneer DVR-A04 as Secondary master and a Lite-On 52x24x52 CD-RW on Secondary slave.

 

[Lord Evermore]

You can get Barracuda ATA FIVES already? Woohoo!

Anyway: did you install and configure EVERYTHING in the WinXP setup on the new drive? Tweaked everything you tweaked on the old system? Partitions laid out pretty much the same? Same file system? All same driver versions?

This is one issue with any version of Windows; it might not even be the drive's fault. Might just be that Windows is being funky for absolutely no traceable reason. Might even be fixed by simply wiping it and installing one more time.

I've had the same sort of problem appear at various times on many systems, and hardly ever can trace it down to any one particular component having been at fault. I usually end up blaming it on Windows itself for being a buggy pile of slapped together code.

It's possible that the Barracuda is very bad at CPU usage even in UDMA mode. Maybe crappy firmware is the cause, maybe not. I seem to recall that HDTach showed a noticeably higher CPU usage when I switched to an ATA IV from a no-so-old Maxtor (the noise level is all I cared about by then).

Other than the possibilities of WinXP just being screwey (or some combination of drivers, Windows, and hardware causing screweyness), and the drive itself being really bad on CPU usage, I don't have any answers.