Slow SATA hard drive performance... help please? :(

[Bagheera]

Hey guys...

My 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9 HDD (ATA-133) just died recently; it was still under warranty so I got a replacement hard drive from Maxtor. But then I thought, what the heck? May be I should look for something more durable, since I leave my system on 24/7. So I bought a Maxtor MaxLine III 250 GB SATA-150 HDD from NewEgg; it comes with 5-year warranty and is designed for 1 million hours of continuous operation.

So I just got my MaxLine III today, hooked it up to the SATA port, installed WinXP with the Third Party Raid driver; WinXP booted up fine...

Then as I began to install all the softwares I noticed something strange - the hard drive seems very slow. Or rather, perhaps the SATA control chip is not handling the bandwidth correctly; I am not sure what the problem is... but I can hardly multi-task. The system responds very slowly/chokes whenever there are more then two programs trying to access the hard drive at the same time; I swear this is at least 40% slower than my IDE hard drive...

Would anyone have had a similar experience with SATA hard drives? Mobo: Gigabyte GA-N400 Pro 2 + Silicon Image 3512 SATA Raid (onboard chip) + Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB

Thanks in advance to those who reply!

 

[INM8]

I dont know whats wrong with your HDD, but id be carefull with it. It seems like alot of the maxline 3's have been dieing lately. Id make sure you have a backup of all your important data just incase.

Is the SI controller the only sata controller on your mobo? It could also be a problem with the sata controllers drivers. Have you got the latest drivers?

Sorry i cant be of much help, but thats all i can think of. I havent ever experienced a problem like that with a drive, but i would enable SMART and keep a close eye on the drive, just incase it decides to die on you.

 

[PurdueRy]

Chipset drivers?

 

[Bagheera]

Umm well this MaxLine III just got to me today, it's brand new... if I am that unlucky as to get a brand new drive that's about to die... err, oh well.

And yes the chipset drivers are installed... :/

 

[Atheus]

DMA mode? It should be in device manager.

 

[Bagheera]

I think DMA mode is on by default? :<

 

[Bagheera]

Just a side note, the peak transfer rate seems to be normal... file transfers between the MaxLine III and other devices are very fast; but it kind of chokes when multiple access to the HDD is requested... humm...

 

[RanDum72]

How much system memory do you have?

 

[Bagheera]

2 gigs of Corsair XMS... :/

 

[Jiggz]

I'm using the same mobo and love it so much for its stability. But now I heard about your experience, maybe I should just stay with my RAID 0 ATA hdd.

 

[Mem]

Would anyone have had a similar experience with SATA hard drives?

I'm using a Maxtor Maxline III HD too(300GB) but it is working great in my Epox 9NPA+ Ultra board,have you tried Maxtor diagnostic utility on their website you can download?..

I would also change HD cable and run Memtest86+ ,start ruling out other things too.