Where is my bottleneck?

[GeezerMan]

I have this problem I would like some advice on. When transfering or copying files from either my C drive or my second drive to an external eSATA or an external USB drive, my PC slows way down. Simple things like web browsing, email, etc, slow down way too much. It's not a CPU intensive task, and it's not a ram intensive task. It's not tying up my main drive since the data is on my second drive. I'm talking about a lot of data, but rather small individual files, like 30mb. I'm backing up my music that sits on my second drive in the PC to my external eSATA drive today. About 200GB. Any ideas?






My rig: Opteron 165 clocked at 2.6GHz, MSI board, 2GB ram, 2 X 400 GB SATA drives, DVD burner, 7600GT, TV tuner, X-FI audio.

 

[Scyon]

Have you tried looking in Task Manager, in the Performance tab? You can tell fairly quickly if your CPU or RAM are being bogged down.

If neither appear to be the culprit, I have a couple thoughts:

1. What is the model of your motherboard?
2. What are the models of your storage devices? (Internal and external)
3. To confirm, your internal hard drives are plugged into the motherboard (not an add-on card), right?
4. Have you tried downloading and installing the latest drivers for your motherboard from MSI?
5. Have you tried updating the bios of the motherboard?
6. Are your hard drives setup as a RAID array? If so, what kind? (0,1,5, etc.)
7. How fragmented are your hard drives?
8. How full are your hard drives?

Hopefully this helps narrow down the problem.

 

[GeezerMan]

Have you tried looking in Task Manager, in the Performance tab? You can tell fairly quickly if your CPU or RAM are being bogged down.

yeah, that's what I used. CPU usage was 8 to 37% at the time. Available Physical Memory was 1415896

If neither appear to be the culprit, I have a couple thoughts:

1. What is the model of your motherboard?

MSI-7125

2. What are the models of your storage devices? (Internal and external)

internal are 2 WD 400GB, they are new. External eSATA are WD 500gb, 6 months old.

3. To confirm, your internal hard drives are plugged into the motherboard (not an add-on card), right?

plugged right into the motherboard sata ports

4. Have you tried downloading and installing the latest drivers for your motherboard from MSI?

yes


5. Have you tried updating the bios of the motherboard?

yes

6. Are your hard drives setup as a RAID array? If so, what kind? (0,1,5, etc.)

no raid at all

7. How fragmented are your hard drives?

I use O&O software to defrag automatically when the screensaver runs.


8. How full are your hard drives?

C: 55GB
D: 215GB
eSATA: 350GB


Hopefully this helps narrow down the problem.



I tried my friends PC today He has a 3800+ X2 overclocked to 2.7GHz on a DFI board. His slows down too when transferring files. Maybe it's normal thing with big file transfers, or maybe I have something set wrong on both PCs since I'm the one who set his up as well.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

I have one HDD. Copy 3.5GB of data from the HDD to an external USB 2.0 HDD. Throughput speed is around 30MB/s. Average CPU load on 146 Opteron @ 2.97GHz is around 18%. No significant slowdown in windows or web browser. DO NOT use the NVIDIA IDE driver or firewall. Standard windows driver is best. I only use NVIDIA to load the chipset driver. Make sure all your HDDs are running in DMA mode 4 or higher in Device Manager. If not then remove the primary and secondary IDE channels in device manager. Reboot into BIOS and verify that the HDD is auto detected and running in DMA mode. Save BIOS and reboot into Windows. Verify that all HDDs are running in DMA mode.

 

[GeezerMan]

I used to NOT use the nvidia IDE driver, but then it would not show my eSATA drives in My Computer unless I scanned for new hardware every time, or I had the eSATA drives already on prior to booting, so then I loaded the nvidia ide drivers. I had heard they had fixed them.

I never have used the nvidia firewall, it was a total failure IIRC.

I'll check the rest of the items you listed. Speed of the transfer of the files seem just fine though.
It's the slowdown of the rest of the PC that bugs me. They are big files though.

 

[GeezerMan]

Link to info on Page File

I found an interesting web page on page files and XP. I deleted the page file off of my C drive, and created a page file on my second drive. BOOM...no more probs. I probably can reduce my page file size too.