Very bad hard drive performance, need help

[Polishwonder74]

Sisoft Sandra benchmark screenshot

Can anyone see anything in my benchmarks here that clue you in to anything that I could do to get my hard drive performance back up?

I boot to this drive, and it's a Maxtor SATA 80GB, 8MB cache. I even went so far as to get a 2nd SATA drive to store my large files on so as to lighten the load on the boot drive and keep it from getting too fragmented.

The best I can think of right now is that the fact that I've got a yellow '?' in my device manager.
Device Manager Screenshot
When I've tried to clear this problem up by fighting with the drivers, I can't boot anymore, so I left it like that.

The mobo is an Asus A7N8X (Nforce 2), and although I've got 2 SATA hard drives, they are not RAIDed.

Can anyone think of anything for me here? Throw me a clue, I'm drowning. And my HL2 loading times are kinda slow, driving me nuts. Thanks, fellas.

 

[mechBgon]

Ok...

1) SiSoft Sandra as a benchmark... :roll:. 'nuf said there.

2) On the A7N8X Deluxe, the onboard SATA controller shares its chipset IRQ with anything you put in PCI slot #3. If you have PCI cards, use slots 2 and 4 first, since they don't have to share.

3) did you try installing the driver for the onboard Silicon Image SATA controller? Hit that problem item in Device Manager and do an Uninstall on it, then redetect the hardware and see what it thinks it is. If you want the drivers from Asus, they're here. Or they will be whenever the airheads at Asus get their stupid server back online, anyway

4) on the A7N8X Deluxe, since the SATA controller is PCI-bound, it might've been better to use a PATA drive, since those are above the whole PCI bus, up on the southbridge itself with that nice fat Hypertransport to the northbridge.

 

[Polishwonder74]

Ok, more news, I just re-benchmarked again w/ Sandra, and I got even worse numbers (21275 kb/s index down from 21790). So Sandra is no good? What do you like to use for benchmarking?

When I first installed windows on this rig, every time I actually installed those Silicon Image drivers I couldn't boot to the SATA drive anymore, so that's why I've been leaving it like that. My hard drive used to run a hell of a lot faster, this seems to be a recent problem. I also benchmarked my other SATA drive (all this stuff is in my siggeh) and got pretty crappy numbers.

I'm thinking of attempting to use those silicon image drivers again, but it'll really ruin my day if I can't boot all of a sudden again. Any other ideas?

MechBgon, thanks for such a quick response.

 

[Polishwonder74]

Oh, I forgot to mention I'm not using any PCI cards at all in this rig. My bad.

 

[Polishwonder74]

More results in. I ran a test with hdtach 2.61 and got this:

http://web.syr.edu/~mrlyaski/avatar/hdtach10-18.jpg

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Polishwonder74
More results in. I ran a test with hdtach 2.61 and got this:

http://web.syr.edu/~mrlyaski/avatar/hdtach10-18.jpg

For a 7200rpm 80GB drive, that does look about right on HDTach. I wonder what's up with the mystery controller in your Device Manager.

 

[Polishwonder74]

Hmmmm. . . Ok, so probably my hardware is ok, maybe I'll try disabling virus detector, firewall, etc. . . and see if she moves any quicker.

Thanks Mech, once again, you're my hero! :beer:

One day I'll solve that device manager mystery. I installed windows like 4 times before I gave up on that silicon image driver. Every time I'd reinstall, she'd quit booting as soon as I installed it. What a pain in the nuts.

 

[wcoffey]

if there is no important data on the ibm "deathstar".remove it from the chain. i would say that 50% - 75% of all the drives we replace are this type. that is why the pet name applies. i would also suggest seagate drives because they are true sata not converted ide drives