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Sudden change in hard disk performance

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darktyco

Member
I just bought a new Seagate Serial ATA 200 GB hard disk and a promise TX2 SATA controller card for it. I bought it so I could transfer video from my work's Sony video camera onto the disk (which I believe requires about 25 MB a second.) I had no problems with this for about a week.

I had not messed around with my system at all, but after my 'honeymoon' week with this nice setup was over, all of a sudden I could not properly transfer video to it. The transfer program seems to operate fine, but only about 1 frame is recorded out of every two seconds. I know it is not the software's fault however, because I can still transfer video onto my old ATA-100 drives just fine.

I've ran the Segate diagnostic tools on the drive and they all pass. The promise controller's BIOS reports the drive is running at Ultra DMA 6 at boot time. I've defragged the drive as well. However, nothing that I have tried has worked. What could be the reason for this sudden nose dive in performance? Does this look like the problem of the controller card or the hard disk? Thanks to anybody who has a suggestion for me.
 
I'm using Windows XP, and I haven't done any updates in the week or so that everything was operating normally. I don't believe I've installed any regular software in that period either.
 
System restore, an overlooked feature that has great benifits few have yet to take advantage of. Some times my machine is running fine and either I update something or for no apparent reason hell breaks loose so I do a system restore and all is well agian, if you have a really big problem on your hands and even sys restore wont work then you might have to do a reinstall. You might wanna backup your video by putting it on another partition because windows has a tendancy for fsck around with files, either deleting them or moving them to a place unknown. Just create a mini partition on the drive, move some crap there, disable sys restore on that partition and do sys restore. Your files will be preserved and the machine should be running fine. If it still doesn't work, you could be facing much greater issues.
 
Originally posted by: Homerboy
What mode is the drive running in within Windows?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure. Its connected to the SATA PCI card, but I have no idea how to find out what mode within Windows it is running in.

I am mostly confused because it worked fine for about a week before the encoding started to fail, but I'm not sure the problem has to do with performance anymore. I ran a benchmark on the drive and the bench mark shows it to be several times faster than my others drives- and the video encodes onto these slower drives just fine. I set the cluster size on the drive to 16 KB, should I have left it at the default when I formatted or something? Or is it because the drive has a single 200 GB (slightly under actually) NTFS partition? Perhaps I should break it up or something?
 
Still trying to troubleshoot this...

What is a good benchmark program I could use to test the write speed of the drive? What about one that could give me cache and other information on it?
 
If you go into Device Manager and view the properties of the TX2 card there should be a tab that shows what the performance of the HDD is. As for a simple test on the drive, try HDTach 🙂
 
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