[radiogeek]

:upset:

I am upset and at a loss, maybe you guys can help with an annoying problem...

The computer I am on now (the one in question) has a strange problem: the hard drives are ridiculously slow. I have two 7200 RPM hard drives (40 gigs each), but they are different brands.

I'm not kidding...this hard drive is about 7 or 8 times slower by comparison (using another computer with the same hard drive and a different bus and CPU, but it's still incredibly faster). Obviously something is up. The is the same computer that locks up when going to the desktop from time to time and when I minimize windows.

What could be causing such poor hard driver performance? The drives are both defragged and are both running as Master (Primary Master, Secondary Master) and the primary master has a CD-RW as a slave.

They are on brand new IDE cables (swapping those doesn't help, I have tried).

Do you guys have any ideas?

I have run a system report from SiSoft Sandra so you can gather intimate knowledge of all my system specs and servies and all the fun things.

http://www.radioupdate.com/system.html
(It's 2.7 megs, but it's concise.)

Thanks for your help...I know something is up, I just don't know what could be causing this computer to drag. It should be performing at astounding speeds, but it's not.

Anyway, thanks for your help in advance!

Wes

 

[eric1971]

Assuming your hard drive is either ATA 100MHz or 133MHz, are you using an ATA 100Mhz or 133MHz cable? If you are using an ATA 33Mhz cable, it would definitely hurt performance.

 

[radiogeek]

No it's definitely the right (fast) cable...that I know for sure.

 

[merlin]

are both IDE channels enabled?

 

[radiogeek]

How can I check this?

(I guess I don't know as much as I thought I did )

are both IDE channels enabled?

 

[Guest]

Is the blue end of the IDE cable attached to the motherboard?

 

[radiogeek]

I just ran a benchmark on the "C" drive, and here are the disappointing (but re-inforcing) results:

My Drive:
3,037 kB/s

It should be upwards of (AT LEAST):
15,000 kB/s

The other drive ("D") confirms these horrible benchmarks.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

 

[johnwill]

Offhand, it sounds like your disks are running in PIO mode, that will make a huge difference. When you check the properties in Hardware Manager, are the hard disks running in DMA mode?

 

[radiogeek]

You're absolutely right. It is set to "DMA If Available", but the current mode is "PIO".

I wonder why DMA won't take? It's supported on all hardware involved...

Any ideas?

 

[merlin]

maybe you can go into BIOS and check if DMA access is enabled ?

 

[johnwill]

With a couple of W2K machines, I had this issue. I had to go through a bit of a "rain-dance" to get them into DMA mode. The problem ended up being allowing the disks to power down, something wasn't getting set properly and they'd revert to PIO. My steps to get them back to DMA.

1. Set all drives to PIO in the Device Manager.
2. Reboot and enter the BIOS setup and set all channels to PIO (no dma).
3. When the system boots, set all drives to DMA if Available in the Device Manager.
4. Reboot again and enter the BIOS setup and set all channels to UDMA.

When the system finishes booting the second time, the disks should be back to DMA mode. I'd recommend against using the power-down feature for the disks if this is a recurring problem.

 

[Pseudocyber]

Power saving sux. Always has.