Slow hard drive access time

[stewrt]

I've got a 200 GB IDE (8MB buffer) drive in my PC that I use as mass storage (Not the boot drive) for gobs of pictures, DVD's, some 300 CD's ripped to it. It still has 60GB of free space but that varies when I'm ripping DVD's. Whenever I go to it and open a folder or point other programs to files on it it takes a good 5 to 8 seconds that it spools before it shows contents. I keep it fairly well organized and defraged at all times.

I'm considering getting a 300 GB SATA drive with 16 MB buffer to replace this one and just buying an encloser and using the 200 as a backup drive for my music and reformat files.
Will doing this, (larger drive, larger buffer) give me better performance or should I expect the same from another drive of these specs? Or is it all the

Thanks,
Stewrt

 

[jpeyton]

Is it spooling up because you set the drive to power down during idle time? You can disable shutting down your hard drives through Power Properties in Windows.

 

[CreativeTom]

Originally posted by: jpeyton
Is it spooling up because you set the drive to power down during idle time? You can disable shutting down your hard drives through Power Properties in Windows.

Yeah it sounds like that's the issue to me as well, the drive should respond almost imediately just for file browsing. I would agree that the drive is turned off after a period of time from the power management settings.

 

[stewrt]

I looked around in "Power options" in the control panel and saw no relation to drive power. Went to "device manager" saw nothing there. Where exactly do I find this?

Thanks alot guys.

ALso I still would like to use the 200 I have as a backup, and get that 300. All my music, and mount my driver CD's to it for reformat ease. Does a 16 mb buffer give me extra performance? I know having more free space helps a bit. What do you think. Good idea? I have alot of CD's that I've bought/downloaded sitting on that drive now and was actually a bit scared she was gonna fail or something. Need a good backup of this stuff.

 

[aatf510]

Originally posted by: stewrt
I looked around in "Power options" in the control panel and saw no relation to drive power. Went to "device manager" saw nothing there. Where exactly do I find this?

Thanks alot guys.

ALso I still would like to use the 200 I have as a backup, and get that 300. All my music, and mount my driver CD's to it for reformat ease. Does a 16 mb buffer give me extra performance? I know having more free space helps a bit. What do you think. Good idea? I have alot of CD's that I've bought/downloaded sitting on that drive now and was actually a bit scared she was gonna fail or something. Need a good backup of this stuff.

You must have missed it. It is where you tell the harddrive to turn off after some minutes of idling. Getting a new harddive would surely helps (unless it's the power-down issues that everyone is talking about, which would be the same for new and old HD), but I would at least defrag the 200GB HD a couple of times before heading for a new one since it still has 60GB left.

 

[stewrt]

Your right............ It was right in front of me. Hard disks are set to "never", Hibernate and Standby are also "Never".

 

[aatf510]

Originally posted by: stewrt
Your right............ It was right in front of me. Hard disks are set to "never", Hibernate and Standby are also "Never".

Then the harddrive was probably never suspended. However, suspension can also be set in the BIOS.

Anyway, how often do you defrag? It helps random access by quite a bit.

 

[stewrt]

I've defragged it 2 or 3 times in the last month.