Seagate drive / system responsiveness oddness

[stultus]

So, I'm having problems with my D: drive. This drive is an 80 gig Seagate Barracuda IV. When I click on the drive in explorer, it takes 3-5 seconds until the contents are displayed. The system just sits there, then 5 seconds later the drive accesses and the contents are displated. This doesn't happen on my other drive, which I have partioned into C and E.

I thought my system was just full of crap, so I formatted and flashed the BIOS (which I've been meaning to do), and on a brand new install the same problem is present. Ran the SMART test and the short test on each of the drives, and they reported no problems.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Czar]

try replacing the cable, might help

 

[ElFenix]

do you have windows set to turn off the drive when idle?

 

[ElFenix]

is it windows xp? and where are your mp3s stored?

 

[stultus]

Both of my drives are on the same cable, windows isn't set to do anything funny to the drive, it's winXP, and my MP3s aren't on that drive.

 

[ElFenix]

my drives will do the same but only if i haven't used them in a while cuz i've got windows turning them off in the power options (the drives make a lot of heat). also XP reads all the MP3 header info so it slows down any directory listings with mp3s somewhere. but those are out.

the only other thing i can see is moving the drives off that same channel.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Mine does it sometimes. I think it's windows doing some sort of cache clearing or something like that before it goes to read the drive's current contents. You might make sure you have things like indexing turned off, try disabling antivirus (now that I think about it, since I uninstalled Norton AV I don't notice it, but that could be coincidence).

 

[stultus]

Aaah, I'll try it without indexing and without NAV (which I'm running), but not running NAV isn't really an option. I did reproduce the stalling on my E partition, so I guess it's not a hardware issue. I'll post back with results.

EDIT: Actually, the stall is explorer using all of my CPU for the few seconds. Is this consistent with your hypotheses? (Oh god, I'm talking like I do at work now...)

 

[Lord Evermore]

Not running NAV is an easy option. There are other virus scanners. Nod32 I liked and is very easy on resources, but wasn't very well integrated. I'm trying out F-Prot now, that used to be the absolute god of AV software and was free, not anymore. The other big-name scanners are just bloated and clunky. My roommate tried Panda Antivirus Titanium's trial version, and apparently it had a memory leak; we watched Task Manager showing it steadily taking more and more memory, killed it when it reached 900MB.

Since Explorer is used for just about everything in Windows, pretty much anything that might cause a slowdown could be doing it through Explorer. If it's traversing a directory structure or something like that, it could be the reason for the slowdown, and it would be explorer.exe doing it.

Look on the various tweak sites for NTFS tweaks in XP. There are a few options that might make a difference here. One stops it from updating the access time on every file, another stops it from making 8.3 filenames. While you're there, change the setting for win95 truncated extensions, and the namenumerictail setting. Ignore any advocations to increase the MFT reservation zone.

 

[Lord Evermore]

And as always, don't make all the changes at once. Do them one at a time and use the system for a little bit to see if it makes a difference. Then you'll know what caused it.