I've recently run into a strange performance loss after a faulty controller decided to take a dump on a couple of my storage drives. The weird part is, it seems to be unrelated to this "damage" to the drives as I've replaced them with brand new drives, a new motherboard, reloaded Windows 7 (64-bit of course), and loaded all the latest drivers, and yet I still have the issue with the undamaged drives.
To start, my old system spec were as follows:
Asus P8P67 Pro Rev 3.1 (Now thought to be damaged)
2x Plextor 128GB PX-128M3 (still undamaged)
2x Western Digital 500 GB WD500AAKS (now damaged; at least 1 anyway)
1x Samsung 400GB HD403LJ (still undamaged)
Intel Core i5 2400 3.1Ghz Quad-Core
4x 4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600
1x MSI R6850 Cyclone PE Radeon HD 6850 1GB
1x Creative X-Fi Titanium PCIe 1x
I used the on-board lan and many of the USB ports, including the additional front-ports.
Anyway, the controller holding the WD and Samsung drives started randomly disconnecting just the WDs (even though the Samsung was on the same controller, it was on a different physical port "stack" (you know how 2 ports are stacked on top of each other); not sure if this even matters) then reconnecting them (sometimes a restart was required towards the end). I wasn't sure the cause of the disconnecting/reconnecting at the time, so I tried drivers and bios to no avail. After a while, when it started getting worse, I decided to reload Windows since I had a bunch of clutter to clean up anyway, and thought maybe there was some kind of corruption going on with the storage drivers for that controller (I was getting desperate and overlooking things).
Anyway, everything installed smoothly, but low and behold, the problem was still there. Unfortunately, after the reload and a couple more disconnects, one of the WD drives developed bad sectors and both kept disconnecting/reconnecting. Tried new SATA cables to no avail, so I disconnected them to prevent the other from succumbing to the same fate, ordered new parts, and installed all of the parts. The new parts are as follows:
MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard
2x Seagate SV35 Series 1TB 7200 RPM SATA (to replace the WDs)
and I replace the video card with a GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7850 1GB for the hell of it.
Upon installing the new parts, I decided to go with another clean install on the SSD Raid 0 and everything installed smoothly again.
Here's the weird thing; the performance on the system PRIOR to all of this happening was incredible. Games and programs loaded on the SSDs opened in a flash; one game, notably, would load in about 5 seconds once you hit the "Play Game" button to actually enter the game (somehow got hooked on Civ V lately...). Upon reloading Windows (both pre and post-part replacement), the performance dropped by about 50% or more (seems random)! Civ V was now loading in about 10-15 sec rather than 5. In addition, transfer rates seemed unstable when copying large amounts of files (especially large files). Transferring files from the HDD-to-HDD/SSD, eHDD (USB3.0)-to-SDD/HDD, eSata-to-HDD/SSD, all have this following problem:
When transferring files, the transfer will often start strong (80-100MB/s+ for all the internals), then suddenly drop down to 10MB/s tops, but typically 7-8MB/s, after a random amount of time. After some additional testing on video files, it's even more random. I can sometimes transfer up to a 20GB folder of videos sustaining 60MB/s+ the entire time, other times I can't even transfer a 300MB single video without it slowing down. Even further testing found that, when copying a single video slowed down to that extent, if I waited a little while before transferring again (say 30-60 seconds), it would sometimes run at the expected speed and sometimes at the slower speed. Prior to all of this happening, I had no trouble maintaining 60MB/s+ transfer rates between drives at all times even if I copied the whole drive!
Anyway, I've run out of ideas and just want to get my system back to the performance I had prior to all of this. I do recall doing performance tweaks that supposedly boost SSD performance when I setup the original system, but can't for the life of me remember what they all were, and tweaks or not, the transfers should be more stable than they are now. Anyone have any ideas as to why I'm getting this unusual performance out of my system and how to fix it? Thanks in advance for any help!
Edit: Boy that was a lot longer than I though... anyway, forgot to mention, the whole cause of the problem is believed to be an extra motherboard riser that was shorting out the old board's one controller.
To start, my old system spec were as follows:
Asus P8P67 Pro Rev 3.1 (Now thought to be damaged)
2x Plextor 128GB PX-128M3 (still undamaged)
2x Western Digital 500 GB WD500AAKS (now damaged; at least 1 anyway)
1x Samsung 400GB HD403LJ (still undamaged)
Intel Core i5 2400 3.1Ghz Quad-Core
4x 4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600
1x MSI R6850 Cyclone PE Radeon HD 6850 1GB
1x Creative X-Fi Titanium PCIe 1x
I used the on-board lan and many of the USB ports, including the additional front-ports.
Anyway, the controller holding the WD and Samsung drives started randomly disconnecting just the WDs (even though the Samsung was on the same controller, it was on a different physical port "stack" (you know how 2 ports are stacked on top of each other); not sure if this even matters) then reconnecting them (sometimes a restart was required towards the end). I wasn't sure the cause of the disconnecting/reconnecting at the time, so I tried drivers and bios to no avail. After a while, when it started getting worse, I decided to reload Windows since I had a bunch of clutter to clean up anyway, and thought maybe there was some kind of corruption going on with the storage drivers for that controller (I was getting desperate and overlooking things).
Anyway, everything installed smoothly, but low and behold, the problem was still there. Unfortunately, after the reload and a couple more disconnects, one of the WD drives developed bad sectors and both kept disconnecting/reconnecting. Tried new SATA cables to no avail, so I disconnected them to prevent the other from succumbing to the same fate, ordered new parts, and installed all of the parts. The new parts are as follows:
MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard
2x Seagate SV35 Series 1TB 7200 RPM SATA (to replace the WDs)
and I replace the video card with a GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7850 1GB for the hell of it.
Upon installing the new parts, I decided to go with another clean install on the SSD Raid 0 and everything installed smoothly again.
Here's the weird thing; the performance on the system PRIOR to all of this happening was incredible. Games and programs loaded on the SSDs opened in a flash; one game, notably, would load in about 5 seconds once you hit the "Play Game" button to actually enter the game (somehow got hooked on Civ V lately...). Upon reloading Windows (both pre and post-part replacement), the performance dropped by about 50% or more (seems random)! Civ V was now loading in about 10-15 sec rather than 5. In addition, transfer rates seemed unstable when copying large amounts of files (especially large files). Transferring files from the HDD-to-HDD/SSD, eHDD (USB3.0)-to-SDD/HDD, eSata-to-HDD/SSD, all have this following problem:
When transferring files, the transfer will often start strong (80-100MB/s+ for all the internals), then suddenly drop down to 10MB/s tops, but typically 7-8MB/s, after a random amount of time. After some additional testing on video files, it's even more random. I can sometimes transfer up to a 20GB folder of videos sustaining 60MB/s+ the entire time, other times I can't even transfer a 300MB single video without it slowing down. Even further testing found that, when copying a single video slowed down to that extent, if I waited a little while before transferring again (say 30-60 seconds), it would sometimes run at the expected speed and sometimes at the slower speed. Prior to all of this happening, I had no trouble maintaining 60MB/s+ transfer rates between drives at all times even if I copied the whole drive!
Anyway, I've run out of ideas and just want to get my system back to the performance I had prior to all of this. I do recall doing performance tweaks that supposedly boost SSD performance when I setup the original system, but can't for the life of me remember what they all were, and tweaks or not, the transfers should be more stable than they are now. Anyone have any ideas as to why I'm getting this unusual performance out of my system and how to fix it? Thanks in advance for any help!
Edit: Boy that was a lot longer than I though... anyway, forgot to mention, the whole cause of the problem is believed to be an extra motherboard riser that was shorting out the old board's one controller.
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