Hard Drive Troubles with Transfers

[mombo]

Alright I am having some trouble with one of my hard drives. The computer it is in is just a storage computer really it has 4 drives in it. 1 500gb system drive and 3 1.5tb storage drives. I didnt notice when it started but today I was transferring some files around and noticed a problem.

Drives 2 - 4 are my 1.5tbs

When transferrings from Drive 2 to Drive 3 my average speed was around 60-80MB/s which is normal some when transferring files from Drive 2 to Drive 4 or Drive 3 to Drive 4 and vice versa.

I start running into troubles when Drive 3 or 4 starts to transfer to Drive 2. Instead of the 60-80mb/s I am now getting 5-8mb/s.

What would cause this drive to write so slowly but not alter its ability to transfer to other drives? Could the drive be failing or maybe cable problems?

I ran HDTune on all 3 of the 1.5tb drives and they all benchmarked very similar. They are all defrag'd every week and I ran the error-checking thing from windows and it came up with nothing.

Thanks for the help ahead of time

Mombo

 

[sminlal]

The drive speed will slow down quite a lot if there is activity from other programs going on at the same time on that drive, or if you are transferring a lot of little files (as opposed to a few large files).

 

[darkguset]

I would try swapping ports to see if that makes a difference.

Also, check in device manager to see if UDMA is enabled or not.

Also, have you installed correctly all chipset drivers?

 

[mombo]

I believe all the chipset drivers are correct I dont understand why 2 of the hard drives would work fine and the other wouldnt if they were not.

File wise I am transferring the same amount and size of files between the drives and they all perform the same except for when drive 2 is being transferred to.

Drive 2 like I said seems to work fine transferring files to the other drives but when those two transfer to drive 2 it slows down to a stand still.

All 3 of the storage drives have no programs or anything installed on them just storage of videos.

I will check the UDMA suggestion I will also try and switch out the SATA cable and try and plug it into a different port. Hopefully its not the port because I do not have any extra ports.

 

[darkguset]

It may be the case that some of your drives are sitting on a different controller. Usually 4 SATA ports on the motherboard will be handled by the onboard Intel controller and another 2 SATA will be handled by a 3rd party (usually Highpoint). Hence if the Highpoint drivers for example where not installed properly, or were corrupted, you would experience weird performance results.

 

[mombo]

Ah ok that make sense. On this computers setup it actually only has 4 ports on it because its a small micro atx board. I did switch ports though and the hard drive is still acting the same I also switch out the cable which didnt help either.

I am thinking it has to be the drive at this point I dont have much else to check..

 

[darkguset]

Sounds like it. Download the drive manufacturer's drive test utility (from their website) and run an extended test and see what that comes back with.

 

[sminlal]

It seems unlikely but it might be worth running a utility to report the drive's SMART counters (such as "DiskCheckup"). If you find protocol or media errors that could be causing slowdowns.