Extremely low write speed on SATA disk

PROBLEM:
Extremely low write speed on SATA disk.

Write speed is ca 2-3 MB/s (tested by copying a 400 MB file). Write speed is ca 55 MB/s according to SiSoft Sandra.

The computer is working normally until I trigger an intensive write scenario (i.e. copy a 400 MB file or install Ms Office). When an intensive write period is started then most of the computer freezes (must works, but most things can't be clicked).

I would really appriciate your comment what your guess would be for the cause of the problem, do you think this seems like a harddrive issue or a motherboard issue? I will attempt to try my disk in my brother's but I have a hard time to get time for that, and I would like to solve the problem asap (e.g. buy a new disk).



SETUP:
This week I purchased new parts. The old setup was very slow (P4 2.6 GHz / 2 GB DDR 400 memory) but I can't recall it was this

slow, however installing Microsoft Flight Simulator X took a LONG time (2 hours?) and it's only 2 DVD:s)

New CPU: AMD PHENOM II X4 955 3.2GHZ BLACK SKT AM3 L2/L3 8MB 125W P
(HDZ955FBGIBOX)

New Memory: OCZ TECH DDR2 PC6400 DDR2 Blade Heatspreader 800MHz 4G Kit (2X2GB) 4-4-
3-15 2.1V (OCZ2B800C44GK)

New Motherboard: GIGABYTE Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD3PLK, GBLAN, DDR2, AM3

New graphics card: ASUS VGA-Card nVidia 9600GT 512MB PCI-E 2xDVI HDCP V-cool Heatsink DVI
to D-Sub adaptor PhysX CUDA (EN9600GT SILENT/2D/512MD3)

Old HD: Western Digital WD2500KS. 7200RPM. SATA2. 16MB cache.

Old DVD: IDE DVD burner

Old PSU: Seasonic S12 430W

Old floppy: Standard

Operating system: Windows 7 64bit RTM, using latest updated from Windows update. The OS was installed from scratch using the new hardware parts. I also tried with Ubuntu Linux 9.4 and experience slow performance but I did not document write speed.

Antivirus: I have tried both with and without antivirus




TROUBLESHOOTING:

- My SATA drive was in Native IDE mode. I changed it to AHCI (after installing chipset drivers), but no change.

- Installed the chipset drivers for the motherboard. There are no exclamation marks in the device manager.

- TODO: DMA mode or PIO mode? I can't find the setting for this.

- The motherboard has two separate SATA controllers: One controlled by the AMD SB750 and one "Gibabyte SATA2". I have tried connecting my harddrive to each.

- The File systems / write test in SiSoft Sandra goes on forever. Read test finished with ca 55MB/s

- Installing Microsoft Office 2007 took ca 20-30 minutes!

- Upgraded motherboard BIOS from F2 to F4

- Temperature: According to Gigabyte MB monitor the system and CPU are both at 40-43 degreec Celsius

- Enabled S.M.A.R.T in BIOS

- Checkdisk

- Downloaded HD diagnostic tool from Western Digital, the quick test shows "OK"

Agreed with sminlal

Enable DMA and your problem should be solved.

Microsoft Documentation as to why this problem is occurring? :

1. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devi [...] e-dma.mspx

2. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/

Hope this helps

You could try uninstalling the disk driver and rebooting to see if that resets the configuration.

This is what i meant with consumers buying new hardware whenever a software design flaw nails them.

Fsun, i can understand you want a working system. But you should be able to use your old 250GB with full speed. It may be old and on the verge of failing, it may also be that your disk is running in PIO mode.

First, please replace the SATA power and data cables, if these show any weakness this is what will trigger windows to use PIO mode even though the drive is listed as DMA capable. So if you have a bad cable, this is what would happen, exactly as you described with periodic freezes due to PIO interrupts. Normally, high cpu usage won't show down your system so drastically - it may not even be noticeable if you have a process using 100% CPU - your scheduler should work to give every process a fair chance of cpu time. So it's consistent with a PIO issue.

So now that you have your new drive, don't just toss your old drive in the bin yet - it may be in perfect condition. If you want further advice please download HDTune Pro evaluation and post a screenshot of both raw read and the "Files" benchmark (its a tab). Let it finish because it does other measurements later like the CPU time.

If the CPU time is 100% (single-core), 50% (dual-core) or 25% (quad-core) - AND - your raw read benchmark shows a flat horizontal line of no more than 16.7MB/s read throughput - you have a PIO issue.