Slow SATA2 Transfers

[blazelet]

Hi all,

I have a Vista x64 system with 3 SATA2 drives installed. The system itself has a Gigabyte GA-EX58 Extreme motherboard with SATA2 controllers. All 3 SATA2 drives are connected through my SATA2 controllers on port 1, 3 and 5.

2 of my HDD are Samsung 500GB HD502U Drives
The third is a Western Digital Caviar 1TB WD10EACS

The problem I am having is whenever I transfer anything to of from the WD drive, I get abysmal transfer speeds. They usually start out around 60MB/s and come to rest around 10MB/s. At these rates it takes about 5 hours to transfer 150GB.

Transferring from my other SATA drives is generally pretty fast.

I am on Vista x64 SP1

I have upgraded my chipset drivers to the most recent version, I have verified 'Enable Write Caching on the Disk' is on for all disks. I have made sure all internal cable connections are secure. I have gone through my BIOS but see no settings for SATA other than 'Enable' or 'Disable' There are some RAID settings but I am not on RAID. I can turn on AHCI but when I do that, my computer doesn't boot, saying I have an invalid system disk.

The WD disk that's performing oddly is one that I took out of a WD Passport External Drive because it was being slow in there, as well. Could the drive itself perhaps be failing?

At this point I'm not sure what else to try. Thoughts?


Ryan

 

[blazelet]

The drive was toast. Today it stopped letting me copy to or from it - must have been why I was having speed problems. I bought a new drive, all is well.

 

[4745454b]

Whenever you have a funny drive, run scan/check disk on it and see if anything pops up. Run Speedfan and read the SMART values. Download and run the manufacturers disk to see if it reports any errors. Odds are it was on its way out, and a SMART value or two might have been tripped.