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Sudden slow HD speed (not spyware related)

K

karmadharma

Member
I got my new computer last w/end and all this week I've been installing a lot of things (some of my old games, some new games I bought, various utilities) and at some point my HD performance has dropped down to *maybe* 1/5-1/10th of what it was before and I have no clue about what's going on.

Things that were nearly instant (like launching firefox) now take 30+ seconds, and let's not even talk about loading games. I double checked that I have no spyware or any other services/processes running in the background but to no avail.

Things I have done around the time of the slowdown:

= run defrag (I wonder if instead of helping this caused problems)
= installed vmware workstation, zonealarm and norton av
= installed hl2, far cry and simcity 4
= installed adobe's photoshop elements 3 demo
= added an external compact flash reader and connected an external HD to back things up (removed the hd soon afterwards).
= added drivers for my external peripherals (2 different USB midi keyboards, sidewinder joystick, force RS steering wheel)

I have tried disabling zonealarm, not letting windows 'index' my HD, uninstalling norton, removing a lot of things from the startup but no dice, things are still slow. I haven't tried yanking the CF reader (just thought about it now, actually) but I can't believe it would be the culprit, right? (although it does create like 4 'empty' HDs for every slot it has (CF, SD, ...) I wonder if this could be an issue as in win trying to 'seek' on those 'empty' HDs, will try to remove that tonight for sure).

Once things are up in the cache (say, launching firefox, quitting, launching it again) everything is blazing fast, it's the HD loading that's bad. Also the XP startup seems to not have changed at all in terms of how long it takes (maybe 20% slower if at all), it's once I'm logged in that things become slow.

My system is:

a8n-sli
Dual eVGA 6800-GT
2gig of kingston ram
2x200gig seagate in RAID1 on the SI raid controller (disabled the nvidia raid in bios)
Audigy 2ZS

any ideas? If I can't figure out what's going on I will have to nuke everything and reinstall which would really blow 🙁
 
You should beat my ATA100 Maxtor 80Gb in a Dell 2400! 😀

Megabytes per second:
Burst 85
Max 66
Min 33
Avg 49
14ms access
 
HD tach gave me a transfer rate for my raid of 2 megabytes/sec! (and 30msec seek).

I kind of got fed up with it and decided to just go with a single drive and just backup to the second occasionally (probably an even better idea) so I moved an HD to one of the 'normal' SATA ports and left the other disconnected.

Currently I have a DVD-RW on IDE0 as a master, and my drive on SATA2. Doing an HDtach gives my transfer rate at 13MB/sec with 100% cpu which is a dead giveaway of dma being 'off'. All of my entries in the device manager are 'dma if allowed' and the one I *think* the SATA HD is in is set to PIO.

How do I enable DMA for my HD? For some reason I also always thought that SATA wouldn't be shown together with the other IDE controllers, not to mention that I thought it would use the NVIDIA driver rather than the MS one (right clicking on my HD in the device manager shows a MS driver).

I am really going nuts here, been trying to get this to work for several hours but no dice: could somebody please give me a hand? thanks in advance.
 
You can enable DMA in Device manager in that drive/channels' properties.

If it reverts to PIO, then you probably have an oversensitive CRC problem [if there are a certain amount of faults with the drive [6], then DMA is disabled automatcally - there is a patch for this if it comes to it]
 
actually I think the problem is that I can't install the nvidia nforce IDE drivers: I've tried installing all sorts of versions (mobo CD, asus' site, nvidia's site) and it always dies with a

'This installation package is not supported by this processor type. Contact your product vendor'

error, which is driving me insane as I am positive I have the right XP drivers (not 64 bit or anything) and can't figure out why the heck they wouldn't install. BTW, how would I know that there are CRC faults with the HD? what patch are you talking about?
 
I am running BIOS 1002, I really don't think it should make a difference here, should it? I think it's something related to XP somehow
 
Could also be dodgy hardware, or cables deteriorating.

If you are having problems installing the IDE drivers/CHIPSET drivers, I would start from scratch with a new install, especially as the system is still new and relatively untouched.

Might want to see if you have any hw lying around first that you can swap out to check individual bits.

Also might want to dl and run MEMTEST32 overnite for EACH stick of RAM you have.
 
The typical fix for the PIO mode problem in XP is to delete the offending controller and allow XP to redetect it. This will usually reset the error counter and restore UDMA mode.

If any of your drives are in PIO mode, it will slow down your computer quite a bit since the CPU is havng to do the work.
 
Just wanted to report on this since after quite a while things are now working great and maybe somebody will benefit from my experience.

- First of all, I was never able to get the nforce4 sata drivers to install (package problems as described above), drive was always stuck in PIO (10-13MB/sec w/ 100% cpu according to HDtach)
- Out of total frustration I decided to reconnect only one HD to the SI controller, surprise surprise, it worked perfectly (59MB/sec w/ 2% CPU)
- Due to various failed driver experiment(s) unfortunately this XP install didn't shut down properly anymore (needed power cycling), HOWEVER I still had the 'other' clean Raid1 HD so I figured, what the heck, let's rebuild things
- In order not to risk anything I bought an extra HD (they are so cheap nowadays), went in the RAID utility and found out I could not 'rebuild', so I crossed my fingers, removed the raid set and recreated it selecting 'offline copy', about 90 minutes later boot up and ARGH, back down to 3MB/sec, GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
- At this point I felt really like banging my head against the wall, the SATA utility was showing the RAID set as 'yellow' and the description of it was 'reduced'. This kind of jogged my memory and I remember(ed) that it had *always* been this way (while on the SI manual the RAID showed as 'green'): was my RAID set this slow from the beginning and I just didn't notice b/c my XP install didn't really have any drivers/programs originally? maybe that was indeed the case and whomever at the shop set my PC up didn't do it correctly.
- I had an 'inspiration' and decided to switch one of the HDs from port 1 to port 4 (and left the other on port 2) in order to be able to select 'rebuild raid' in the BIOS
- The SATA bios unexpectedly started copying things again, weird, at this point it was late and I went to sleep
- Wake up this morning, boot up XP and notice it's way faster than usual, HDtach and yay! 58MB/sec again and in RAID1, I'm so happy!

I really wonder why HDTach doesn't give me a much higher bandwidth (after all in RAID1 although write speeds slow, read speeds should be nearly twice as fast) but hey, whatever, it's working well, it feels extremely snappy (XP boots *extremely* quickly for example) and I definitely won't touch anything anymore. I'll just keep the extra HD as a spare in case one of the RAID HDs will fail in the future.

I wish there was more documentation on the RAID utility, though, I still have no clue what 'reduced' means about the raid state, not to mention that at some point it told me my RAID was in 'legacy/bootable' mode and that if I converted it it might not have worked anymore (???). I was also wondering if one HD died while it was set up and the RAID was not rebuilt (but in that case the controller should've done it transparently while the computer was on), another possibility could be that when the people at the shop exchanged my mobo (which gave up the ghost after a few days) they reconnected the RAID wrong which caused things to slow down (and it would just have needed a 'rebuild' if that was the case).

Oh well, I am glad that this is over. Thanks for all the help!
 
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