Here's a quick overview of my computer & how I came up with this problem.
PC specs (none of it is overclocked):
- CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz)
- Motherboard: Asus P5K Premium (bios version 0504)
- Graphics: Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTS
- Memory: 2x 1GB of DDR2 Corsair RAM
- Drives: an IDE Maxtor 200 GB (6L200P0) & a SATA WD Caviar 320 GB (WD3200AAKS-00YGA0)
In the Bios (SATA Configuration)
- Sata Configuration: Enhanced (other options: Disabled, Compatible)
- Configure SATA as: IDE (other options: RAID, AHCI)
- Hard Disk Write Protect: Disabled
- SATA Detect Time Out (Sec): 35 (which is the highest, only other values are inferior multiples of 5)
Roughly a month ago, I bought a new sata drive from Western Digital, a Caviar 320 GB, which I used to install Vista on after formatting it the way I wanted it in XP. When I first placed the drive in my computer I checked in all the obvious places to make sure it was seen by everything & that there were no problems. The bios could see it along with my previous drive & the settings it had chosen seemed to me to be correct.
When I booted into Vista for the first time, things seemed normal at first, but when I actually started making the drive work a bit, I noticed that Vista became abnormally slow at random times & started intermittently freezing. After the minimum amount of research & no luck, I decided to just reinstall Vista. But unfortunately that didn't solve anything. The same thing would still happen. At first I thought it seemed to happen with network activity, so I unplugged my cable. Then I thought it might be an IDE/SATA conflict so I removed all IDE connections. I kept thinking that different things were causing it, but it was in fact completely random.
Then I realized it actually had nothing to do with Vista but the new drive itself. I booted into my XP installation & had no trouble at all. Everything loaded fine & I didn't have these intermittent jolts. I thought I'd reformat the new drive (yet) again so I started copying certain files over. This transfer nearly came to a stop half way, the estimate sky rocketed to 150+ minutes for a 2 GB transfer... And this was in XP, but a transfer from my new sata drive. This is when it dawned on me that the problem might be the new drive itself & not vista. So I started trying out different things. I tried playing a game from my new drive (still in XP here) & it was intermittently freezing just like Vista was. When I copied the game over to my current XP/IDE drive, it worked perfectly. Not a single glitch throughout 2 full hours of play compared to really annoying ~5 second freezes every few seconds. I also tried watching videos from my sata drive, same thing... Playback would freeze every so often, so I copied the video file over to my old IDE drive & no surprises: it played fine.
So, being the genius that I am, I came to the conclusion that the problem was my new drive! The same type of intermittent freezing when you ask it to do just about anything. So no wonder Vista couldn't operate properly... I've run several benchmarking tools (HD Tune, WD Diagnostics, SiSoft Sandra, etc) but none find any problems anywhere, the only strange occurrence that I did find was the performance chart HD Tune generated which showed huge down-spikes (link below).
So it could be that the drive's somehow badly configured somewhere, it could be that my mother board has a problem with SATA (I've also tried swapping the sata connector to a different slot without it making any difference), or it could be the drive itself which is somehow flawed. Or obviously something else that I haven't thought of... I've gone through all the usual motions, updated drivers, updated bios, searched the internet, ... But I've really come to a stand-still point here & I'm running out of tricks... It's been nearly a month since I bought this drive now & I really can't find out what the problem is.
And I'm afraid this is the only SATA drive I have. So I can't test it with any other drive to see if it's a problem generally related to SATA or just this disk in particular.
Anyway, any help would be greatly appreciated. I'll be checking back on this thread incase anybody needs some more specific/extra information.
Thanks in advance.
PC specs (none of it is overclocked):
- CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz)
- Motherboard: Asus P5K Premium (bios version 0504)
- Graphics: Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTS
- Memory: 2x 1GB of DDR2 Corsair RAM
- Drives: an IDE Maxtor 200 GB (6L200P0) & a SATA WD Caviar 320 GB (WD3200AAKS-00YGA0)
In the Bios (SATA Configuration)
- Sata Configuration: Enhanced (other options: Disabled, Compatible)
- Configure SATA as: IDE (other options: RAID, AHCI)
- Hard Disk Write Protect: Disabled
- SATA Detect Time Out (Sec): 35 (which is the highest, only other values are inferior multiples of 5)
Roughly a month ago, I bought a new sata drive from Western Digital, a Caviar 320 GB, which I used to install Vista on after formatting it the way I wanted it in XP. When I first placed the drive in my computer I checked in all the obvious places to make sure it was seen by everything & that there were no problems. The bios could see it along with my previous drive & the settings it had chosen seemed to me to be correct.
When I booted into Vista for the first time, things seemed normal at first, but when I actually started making the drive work a bit, I noticed that Vista became abnormally slow at random times & started intermittently freezing. After the minimum amount of research & no luck, I decided to just reinstall Vista. But unfortunately that didn't solve anything. The same thing would still happen. At first I thought it seemed to happen with network activity, so I unplugged my cable. Then I thought it might be an IDE/SATA conflict so I removed all IDE connections. I kept thinking that different things were causing it, but it was in fact completely random.
Then I realized it actually had nothing to do with Vista but the new drive itself. I booted into my XP installation & had no trouble at all. Everything loaded fine & I didn't have these intermittent jolts. I thought I'd reformat the new drive (yet) again so I started copying certain files over. This transfer nearly came to a stop half way, the estimate sky rocketed to 150+ minutes for a 2 GB transfer... And this was in XP, but a transfer from my new sata drive. This is when it dawned on me that the problem might be the new drive itself & not vista. So I started trying out different things. I tried playing a game from my new drive (still in XP here) & it was intermittently freezing just like Vista was. When I copied the game over to my current XP/IDE drive, it worked perfectly. Not a single glitch throughout 2 full hours of play compared to really annoying ~5 second freezes every few seconds. I also tried watching videos from my sata drive, same thing... Playback would freeze every so often, so I copied the video file over to my old IDE drive & no surprises: it played fine.
So, being the genius that I am, I came to the conclusion that the problem was my new drive! The same type of intermittent freezing when you ask it to do just about anything. So no wonder Vista couldn't operate properly... I've run several benchmarking tools (HD Tune, WD Diagnostics, SiSoft Sandra, etc) but none find any problems anywhere, the only strange occurrence that I did find was the performance chart HD Tune generated which showed huge down-spikes (link below).
So it could be that the drive's somehow badly configured somewhere, it could be that my mother board has a problem with SATA (I've also tried swapping the sata connector to a different slot without it making any difference), or it could be the drive itself which is somehow flawed. Or obviously something else that I haven't thought of... I've gone through all the usual motions, updated drivers, updated bios, searched the internet, ... But I've really come to a stand-still point here & I'm running out of tricks... It's been nearly a month since I bought this drive now & I really can't find out what the problem is.
And I'm afraid this is the only SATA drive I have. So I can't test it with any other drive to see if it's a problem generally related to SATA or just this disk in particular.
Anyway, any help would be greatly appreciated. I'll be checking back on this thread incase anybody needs some more specific/extra information.
Thanks in advance.
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