HDD in optical bay with a very poor transfer rate

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md_bluelily

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Oct 21, 2014
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Hi,

I have encountered a weird problem after I upgraded my hard drive on my laptop.

I have a Dell inspiron 1764 with an Intel i5 430M as the CPU, Intel HM55 for the main chipset and 8GB Kingston Ram. The laptop came originally with a Samsung HM500JI 500GB SpinPoint M7 but I thought of upgrading it to a SSD. I installed a Crucial MX100 256GB as the fixed HDD and installed my old Samsung HDD as the second drive via a caddy in the ODD.

The problem is whenever I try to copy files to or from the Samsung drive, it starts with a transfer rate of 20MB/s or something close and after few seconds gets stuck to 0KB/s and the hard drive LED remains on for a long time without any progress. Again, after a long pause it starts copying for a really short period of time and then get stuck again. Even if the file copy/move finish, some of the files are corrupted and not usable at all.

I googled a lot and noticed few have suggested to lower the second hdd transfer rate using a jumper. I did the same without any success. I have also deleted all the partitions, recreated them, scanned them using CHKDSK (/r to mark any bad sector) and this has not helped too.

I have also cleaned the connectors on the caddy and hdd and no success is achieved.

I tried moving SSD to ODD and HDD to where it was but windows was unable to start and turned the laptop off during the boot time. I also tried installing windows while in this configuration but could not get windows setup running at all.

I installed HDTune and the results were a shame! I will post them in case you are interested to look into them as well.

I am also receiving loads of the following error message in windows event viewer:
The IO operation at logical block address 0x177dd4d8 for Disk 1 (PDO name: \Device\00000050) was retried.

I wonder if anybody could help me to resolve this issue please.

UPDATE: I think I just found the problem. The jumper seems not to be working properly. It automatically changes back to 3Gb/s rather than 1.5 Gb/s.

Is there any software to force the drive to work in a certain mode (e.g. SATA I (1.5Gb/s) only mode)?

Many thanks.
 
Solution
Boogieman_WD
Hey md_bluelily. I think that this sounds more like a hardware problem than a software one, which could be fixed by a program. You should try the caddy with a different laptop and the drive to see if the same issue occurs. Also try the HDD alone to see if there's any problem with the drive itself. It could be a bad SATA connection or the caddy could be faulty, so you should go try every possible combination on a different computer to rule out problems with each of them. And about the jumper, I'm not sure that this would do the trick, because jumpers are meant for IDE connections and wouldn't play any role in this case. But again, I think that the problem lies either with the connection or the caddy.

I hope that helps. Good luck...
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Jul 31, 2014
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Hey md_bluelily. I think that this sounds more like a hardware problem than a software one, which could be fixed by a program. You should try the caddy with a different laptop and the drive to see if the same issue occurs. Also try the HDD alone to see if there's any problem with the drive itself. It could be a bad SATA connection or the caddy could be faulty, so you should go try every possible combination on a different computer to rule out problems with each of them. And about the jumper, I'm not sure that this would do the trick, because jumpers are meant for IDE connections and wouldn't play any role in this case. But again, I think that the problem lies either with the connection or the caddy.

I hope that helps. Good luck.
Boogieman_WD
 
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md_bluelily

Reputable
Oct 21, 2014
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4,510


Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I have identified the issue. The problem is not with the caddy or the HDD. The HDD was already installed on the laptop and was the main drive for few years. I have scanned it via chkdsk and EaseUS Partition Manager (surface test) but there is no error with the disk.

The jumper is sort of working as without the jumper it is even worse. When I leave the jumper on the HDD, it becomes slightly more reliable.

As I have mentioned above, the issue resides with the link speed. The link speed is set to 3Gb/s when windows starts up and after doing a file copy and cancelling it the link will reset back to 1.5Gb/s and everything will be alright until the next restart.

So, I am trying to find an application, registry setting or any hardware tweak to force the SATA mode to remain on 1.5Gb/s.

I wonder if anybody knows how to enforce the SATA mode or speed to remain on SATA I (1.5Gb/s).

Many thanks.
 
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