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Slow HD Read Speeds

I

ianbergman

Senior member
OK... this one has me stumped. My computer has been taking FOREVER to boot lately, and after running some benchmarks it seems that the boot drive is ridiculously slow. Read speeds are about the equivalent to an old 5GB 5400 RPM drive, according to FreshDiagnose. The thing is, it's an 80GB Seagate Barracuda IV drive, 7200 RPM.

It's not the controller, the IDE cable. Four other hard drives in the system all benchmark about where they should. Anyone have any ideas, or know of utilities I could run to further test the drive? S.M.A.R.T. doesn't give any indication of an impending failure, the drive is defragmented and has no errors on it...

I haven't tried cloning the drive to another one and reformatting, but I'd really, really rather not do that.

any help would be most appreciated.
 
WinXP Pro;

drives are all M/S - the boot drive is the master on my mobo's primary IDE channel. Three other hard drives are on the mobo, with 1 HD and 3 CD/DVD on a Promise ATA-133 controller card.

update: I installed "HDD Health" to monitor the SMART data of the drives, and I keep getting a popup message saying "write error rate changed." It seems to be fluctuating from around 93 to 98. Unfortunately I have no idea what that means.
 
Get the seatool drive utility from seagate support online, see if it finds any drive errors. I love seagate, I just bought a 120GB 7200.7 because of all the success I have had with their SCSI products in the servers I work with. Nevertheless, drives break. Test it.
 
It's passed a number of different diagnostics. However, I don't have a floppy drive in my system (or readily available), which makes running the seatools... difficult, to say the least. Anyone know of any good HD diagnostics that boot off a CD?
 
Have you checked the EVENT LOG to see if there is
some SERVICE that may be hanging while booting?

Have you tried running BOOTVIS?
 
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