S-ATA problem, slow transfer rate

[looper]

I have recently bought 2 Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200GB 7200RPM S-ATA/150 harddrives and have now run into some problems.
The most obvious is that when I watch videofiles they are choppy. They stop for a second and then continue. This happens a couple of times a minute.
Yes I have all the right codecs installed, I have tried several different codecs, uninstalled and reinstalled all codecs and graphic card drives.

I then noticed that the problem only existed on one of the drives and I began to suspect the drives. I tested to

play a video file and also copy files between the drives. I noticed that the transfer speed at the same time as the movie "chopped" dropped to less than 1MB/s!

Then I tried HD Tune, a hardrive benchmark program, and got these results:

This is a benchmark of the problematic disk

This is a benchmark of the second disk that works fine

I have checked so that UDMA is not off, so that's not the problem. I've tested with Powermax, a diagnostic application from Maxtor and it showed no problem. Could it be the S-ATA controller that have problem with the transfer rate? If so, I don't have a clue how I can fix/update S-ATA controller-drives so if you think that's the problem, please explain how to do that

Computer spec.
Pentium 4 3.6GHz
2x 512MB DDR2 533MHz
Motherboard: ASUS P5GD2
2x Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200GB 7200RPM S-ATA/150
Radeon X850XT 256MB

 

[JoeTechie]

Have you tried different SATA Cables ? I have found strangely that this matters much more than people discuss. Not an absolute, but always worth a try.

-J

 

[looper]

I only have 1 kind of cables and that's those who came with the motherboard :/ But the harddrives uses the same cables and it's only one of them that has this problem, so I don't think that's the issue.

 

[JoeTechie]

Switch cables then.

Also, if the "bad" drive is the "C:", then just the os can be acting as the interferance. This is why video edit systems have system drives and data drives... the System drive needs to act very differently, and cannot devote full resources to streaming data.

-J

 

[looper]

Forgot to mention, the "bad" disk consist of a "C:"-partition, with Windows, of 10gb and the rest as another partition.
Will try to change cables and hope that the problem is that simple

 

[JoeTechie]

Partition or not - the drive heads still have to access that data on the Drive 0, vs the Drive 1 where they do not. You will never get the same speed and access times from Drive 0 and Drive 1...though they SHOULD be closer than what you are showing.

-Joe

 

[looper]

Tried to swap cables, no change.

Even if they should access data at different speeds it definitly shouldn't drop as much as it does.

 

[apocalyp5e]

Interesting... like they said try another cable and do a chkdsk on that drive. I had similar problems with a drive that had corrupt file system.

 

[looper]

Interesting... like they said try another cable and do a chkdsk on that drive. I had similar problems with a drive that had corrupt file system.

Buy a new cable or use the other one? Since I only have these 2 cables I've only beenm able to test by swapping them and it didn't work.