Very strange problem with hard drive!

[alexruiz]

Hi everyone. My system suddenly started feeling strangely and inconsistently slow, and I found the culprit. The system drive write speed is way lower than normal. What I mean as way lower is something like 20x slower....

For some reason, the drive is capped at aprox 4 MB/sec write Strangely, read speed are still normal (~90 MB/sec) Yes, I know write speed are usually slower than read speeds, but from 90 Mb/sec read to a 4 MB/sec write, something is obviously wrong.

At first I thought something was botched with my windows install, so I decided to to restore a previous Ghost image. Problem is, even Ghost 2003 under DOS is still writing at only 200 MB/min. That obviously discards the botched windows idea, as even in the BIOS it is still very slow to write.


Some background
Disk is a 1TB HGST Deskstar 7K1000.B, CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 BE 955, motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P (Bios F8). This drive has WinXP Pro SP3 on it. I also have a Samsung Spinpoint F3 HS502HJ 500GB as second OS drive with windows 7 AMD64 ultimate. Writing to the Samsung is still normal, as I can copy a full DVD ISO from the 7K1000.B to the F3 in less than a minute. However, writing to the 7K1000.B is slow (4 MB/sec) no matter if I boot in XP, windows 7 or DOS

The only change I made to the system was a case upgrade. The new case is a CoolerMaster gladiator 600, toolless and bottom mounted PSU. I also changed my 2 SATA ODD from the SB750 SATA ports to the gigabyte JMB36x additional 2 ports. At first, I was blaming the slow down to the JMicron controller, but after changing the ODD back to the SB750 it remains the same. I have even disabled the JMicron ports in the BIOS, and still nothing. I haven't tried the drive in a different machine, but I don't think it should matter

Any suggestion? As you can see, 90 MB/sec read with a 4 MB/sec write is NOT a normal situation of "write slower than read is normal....." Not by that much of a discrepancy.


Thanks

 

[Elixer]

Bad cable, or bad HD? Check your event logs and see if there are any errors/warnings.
You may also want to see what the SMART status is, it may also shed some light on the problem.

 

[imported_Scoop]

That happened to my old Maxtor 80GB drive. Booting up the system took like 10-15 minutes with that drive connected even though the OS was installed on a different drive. The drive was making a horrible sound and I'm pretty sure it was busted. I salvaged the most important stuff, which was a pain in the ass 'cause the transfer took ages. And I got rid of the drive.

Maybe you should at least do a backup of the important stuff. That's the only advise I can give.

 

[alexruiz]

You guys are the best! That is why I always come to AT first when I have computer issues
It was the freaking cable!!

The drive passes all tests with no problems. The ironic part is that the defective cable was an "upgrade", as it was angled with a latch, and it came bundled with the gigabyte mobo. I was using before a cheapie red cable, straight in both ends without latch that came with an ECs mobo... guess ECS bundled a higher quality part.

Thanks again



Alex