Slow Harddrive?

[joenobody]

Hi,
I bought a New XPS 420 from Dell and just got it.

Intel® Core?2 Q6600 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB)
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 DIMMs
nVidia GeForce 9800 GT 512MB
500GB - Seagate 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1

It boots up fine and everything, but I had my harddrive from the computer it's replacing, a Western Digital 160GB SATA Drive. (Model WD1600JD-75HBCN).
My plan was to put the operating system on the WD Drive and use the Seagate as storage. I formatted the WD Drive and put Vista on it, and now it's extremely slow. It boots fine, but takes around 4 minutes, and opening up Firefox takes about 30 seconds, and opening up anything usually takes at least 30 seconds to a minute. Much slower than it ran on my older computer. If I boot up the computer using the Seagate drive, everything is as fast as it should be. Is there a reason it runs so slow on the WD? They both show up in the BIOS with the Seagate in SATA-0 and the WD in SATA-2. I can't figure this out. Any help would be great.

Thanks.

 

[Ksyder]

Sounds very odd... did you use some sort of Dell recovery disks to install Vista on the new drive? How is the driver situation on the formatted hard drive?

 

[joenobody]

I used the actual OS Disk for the install. As far as drivers, I got the latest Nvidia driver for the Video Card, but the rest are just whatever Vista did. Yeah, I'm not sure why this is happening. Thanks for the reply.

 

[Ksyder]

I'm going to assume you've got all the updates for Vista, and are running the best chipset drivers, etc, from the dell website. You should go down the list of drivers available for your dell and install them, as needed. I don't know if it would help in this case but its something I'd do definitely, anyway. So you basically paid for a Vista license with your Dell, and you have another separate (non-dell) copy that you used this time?

 

[joenobody]

The computer actually came with the Vista CD, so I used that. I know they used to just send you a Recovery Disk, but I think now they actually send you the OS CD as well. At least they do here in Canada. Good idea about checking all the drivers from Dells website, I'll try that.
Thanks.

 

[Ksyder]

I would assume that the disk that came with the dell would include the drivers for that machine. You probably checked the device manager already to ensure all all drivers were present?

I've been wondering if it has to do with AHCI drivers on your system - I don't know if any of this is applicable to you-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...t_Controller_Interface

I've always run my sata drives in IDE mode (I think) so I don't have alot of experience with the subject but it's something to look into.