WD Hard Drives are very very slow, please help me.

[ThumpR777]

I have built a new system and because of rebates I thought I would try out Western Digital Hard Drives, and got 2 WD 800JB SE with 8mb cache, and a single 40G 2mb cache WD as well. I am using the onboard SATA Raid chip, and Siig SATA Converters. Sandra is showing the 2 WD SE in Raid (0) (64K Stripe) are running at only 11201 Kbs, which is slower than a single old 30G Maxtor I have kicking around (it pulls 22492 Kbs in Sandra on a single IDE channel)

I have two Maxtors 740DX 60G (2mb cache) and so I plugged those into the same Raid Setup, and they pulled over 44896 Kbs in Sandra, 4 times faster than the WD SE's! I ran the WD Diagnostic utility on both drives and they passed, but they are so slow it timed out once. The jumper is removed, which is Neutral. The single WD 2mb cache on the IDE channel is also super slow.

Is there a problem with WD drives and the Asus Nforce boards? I am ready to go back to Maxtor although everyone says the WD drives are fast, they are slow as molassas in my rig. Has anyone else had the same problem? I have searched the Net and have found no one with the same issue.

Athlon 2400 (oc to 333FSB and 2.28Ghz)
Asus A7N8X
512Mb Samsung DDR PC 2700
Siig SATA to ATA converter x2
WD SE 80G Hard Drive x2 in RAID on SATA
WD 40G Hard Drive
Samsung DVD/CD-R Combo Drive
Triple boot: WinMe, Win2K, WinXP

 

[mechBgon]

First try this, assuming you're using WindowsXP: reinstall the nVidia 2.03 driver pack but watch the prompts carefully. When you see the prompt asking to install the "SW" IDE driver, click No. Reboot when it's done and see if it's improved.

If that doesn't help, then go into Windows Disk Management and change the RAID to a Dynamic Disk (but back up any important stuff first!).

 

[dejacky]

they do have slow access times. down with WD! Odoyale RULES!

 

[magomago]

Odd, my WD gets 39k-41k depending how nice the pc dogs are to me.....


Don't install the Nvidia 2.03s!!!

The a7n8x has slight modifacations that Asus puts out its own drivers: Download the 1.16 Asus (they are newer than the 2.03s - its a different nomenclature)

 

[mechBgon]

You'd know better than me, since you have an A7N8X-Deluxe but nVidia does claim to fully support the A7N8X-Deluxe. Anyway, the important point is to NOT install the SW driver, whichever driver package you use (in WinXP, that is... with Win2000 there is evidently no SW driver to avoid in the first place).

 

[ThumpR777]

OK, I am a little confused. I cannot find an "SW" Driver in the bunch, and even if I did, there is no prompt like in Via Drivers to choose which ones you want to install, the All-in-One has a mind of its own and once it starts it never asks you anything, such as what drivers you want to install. I could not find seperate downloads for the indivual components. So please tell me what the "SW" driver is and how I uninstall it?

Here is the Nvidia Driver list for the 2.03v for reference:
Audio driver 3.17 (WHQL)
Audio utilities 3.17
Network driver 3.13 (WHQL)
GART driver 2.78 (WHQL)
SMBus driver 2.75 (WHQL)
Memory controller driver 2.75 (WHQL)
IDE driver 2.70 In The Box (WHQL)
Display Drivers 41.13 (WHQL)

Asus 1.16 driver for WinXP.
Audio 3.17 (WHQLed)
Enet 2.81 (WHQLed)
GART 2.78 (WHQLed)
SMBus 2.75 (WHQLed)
MemCtl 2.75 (WHQLed)

 

[mechBgon]

You refer to the VIA 4-in-1 drivers. Did you mean the nForce driver pack? If you really did install VIA drivers then that's surely part of the problem, since it's not a VIA-based motherboard. The SW driver is only going to pop up in the WinXP install.

I see you triple-boot, so don't upgrade to Dynamic Disk unless you can live without WinME. But that is probably the other next thing to try. Or just skip the RAID0 action, perhaps... StorageReview.com finds that the increased transfer rate doesn't do much for the actual system performance (see their front page quickie test).

 

[magomago]

Is it me, or is the Asus site always so ridiculously slow- even for my 56k? You think with the profits they rake in by charging a tad over the normal price they'd afford better servers

nf2v116_w2k.zip 1.16 2003/01/29 Win2K NForce2 all in one version 1.16 driver for Win2K. Due to different naming rules, this 1.16 driver, though named 1.16, is still newer than the one on NVIDIA website.

http://www.asus.com/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=A7N8X%20Deluxe



Wow...triple boot?

 

[ThumpR777]

You refer to the VIA 4-in-1 drivers. Did you mean the nForce driver pack? If you really did install VIA drivers then that's surely part of the problem, since it's not a VIA-based motherboard. The SW driver is only going to pop up in the WinXP install.

I was not clear enough, no, I did not install the Via drivers, I was mearly using that as a comparision to how differently the Nvidia drivers install. Although I have installed XP Pro only about 10 times, I dont remember an SW driver option but it seems there is no way to uninstall it. Also the slow speed is across all OS's and W2K is worse than XP. Also, the WD drives are very cool even under full load which tells me they are not spinning very fast. The cause of that is still a mystery, but its both of them.

Also, yes, Asus has a slow website, but they seem to be in the middle of a redesign, so hopefully it will improve.

Since I dont want to lose my WinMe partition, I am going to return the WD and go with Maxtor, as there seems to be no problem on my system with them. I cannot test the WD in another system at this time, but maybe in a few days.

Thanks.

 

[ThumpR777]

Returned the WesternDigital after waiting 3 hours for a customer service rep, and they told me that they dont offer support for their drives in a RAID array.

Bought the Maxtor Ultras 80G with 8mb cache. No problems and they are super fast.