mv331

G'day there,

This is my first attempt at this forum, it looked rather welcoming so I thought I'd give it a try.

There is this ongoing hitch with my PC that I can never overcome. 2 months ago I upgraded my computers internal hard drive from an ATA to a SATA hard-drive which up front I read that they perform better and faster so I purchased one to replace my now near dead ATA, which I now use as a paperweight.

The performance that I have seen has been just the opposite from what Ihave read and has let me down and was wondering what I may be doing wrong.

There have been several computers that I have witnessed using slower processors, less RAM (Celeron 2.4Ghz with 256M RAM is one example I have seen) and they all use a SATA drive and outperform mine by a long shot as far as speed is concerned.
Why is this happening? Why does it take about 40 seconds when my computer boots to read the hard drive settings and then longer for XP to boot up until I get the logon screen. Previously this took less than 40 seconds to boot with the ATA drive (before it started playing up) to get a logon screen.


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The hard-drive settings as read from the BIOS are as follows:

IDE CHANNEL 0 MASTER: NONE
IDE CHANNEL 0 SLAVE : WDC WD800BB (Western Digital ATA - 80GB)
IDE CHANNEL 1 MASTER: NONE
IDE CHANNEL 1 SLAVE : IOMEGA CDRW
IDE CHANNEL 2 MASTER: S_ATA1-ST380817AS (Seagate SATA - 80GB)
IDE CHANNEL 3 MASTER: S_ATA2-NONE

==============================================================



Windows XP is installed on the SATA (Seagate) drive and is set up as the boot priority drive in the BIOS.
I use the other drive (ATA) as a working drive where I store all my backups and direct the 'My Documents' folder if the OS fails or if it gets a virus.

BTW its not just the boot process that is bothering me, this is just an example. It's also slower when opening programs and opening large files etc..


I originally built the PC in November 2004 and it contains the following:

Gigabyte GA-8I848P-G (mobo)
P4 3.0Ghz
Kingston 2x 256MB RAM
WinXP Pro.


Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks in advance.

mv331

95five-0

Try going to pcpitstop.com and running the full test. It could be a bad drive with slow seek times. The test will let you know. Also make sure you run a defrag of the drive. Let us know what you find.

mattlock

Hello mv311, I see that your Pata drive is configured as a slave. You should configure it as the Master on the primary Ide channel, same goes for your CD/RW drive. They should be jumpered as Master and placed on the end of thier ribbon cable. The hard drive on the Primary Channel and the CD drive on the Secondary Channel. It may or may not have an effect on your performance. I've seen some systems it had no effect on and others that simply didn't like that configuration.

justpassingby

Unfortunately, the longer wait time for your drives detection at startup is kind of mandatory once you use sata drives on a system with ide drives.

Theoretically, the Seagate using one single 80GB platter should outperform the Western Digital (3x27GB platters) in pure transfer speeds, at least at the start of the first partition. Average seek times for the Seagate are 8.5ms on the manufacturer's website. Use a drive benchmark utility and see how good (or bad) your disk performs.

Go to disk management (right-click on my computer => manage => disk management) and check that your sata drive is formated using NTFS. If it's FAT32, you most certainly found your problem.