Low Transfer speeds between internal hard drives

[gamechief]

Hello All,

I am a very heavy PC User and am usually the one answering questions but i am at a lost for words with this issue. I have a total of four internal hard drives all are having latency issues from reading to writing. The latency speeds are so bad that its affecting the writing performance on my cd-rom drive. To give you an idea of how bad to transfer an 6mb song it takes a about 2 minutes transferring at about 300kb/s on average.

To start off, i first started encountering issues when i would listen to music. WMP would stop and start and sometimes stutter. I originally thought it was an issue with the songs i had on the drive so i tried them on a different machine and they played without hiccup. What i have done so far is re-imaged my machine checked and made sure that all of my drives had DMA but there is one that will not change to DMA no matter what i do. I have defragmented all drives to rule out any issues of that sort. S.M.A.R.T. identified all drives as healthy and i dont think all 4 hard drives could failscade at once.

What i havent tried:
Not sure if its even worth it but

setting controllers to SATA natively
testing hard drives individually on a different machine

Is there any other troubleshooting steps that could be done?

 

[gamechief]

This is one of the drives which is outputing the same unacceptable performace as stated above.

HD Tune Pro: WDC WD5000AAKS-00UU3A0 Benchmark

Test capacity: full

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 0.0 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 1.8 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 0.5 MB/s
Access Time :
Burst Rate :
CPU Usage : 5.1%

 

[sminlal]

On thing to check is to run a utility such as DiskCheckup which reports the SMART data for the drive. It's possible that the drive has a suspect cable or other problem that's causing retries - if so it should show up in the SMART counters.

Another is to make sure the drive isn't running in PIO mode. Look in Device Manager (Start -> right-click "Computer" and select "Manage", click the "Device Manager" link in the left pane), open up the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" node (use this node even if you have SATA ports), right-click on each channel and select properties, select the "Advanced Settings" Tab, and confirm that the "Current Mode" in the "Devices" list is one of the DMA modes.

 

[Hawkeye22]

What i have done so far is re-imaged my machine checked and made sure that all of my drives had DMA but there is one that will not change to DMA no matter what i do.

If you know which drive does not have DMA enabled, you can delete it from the device manager, then either scan for new hardware or reboot. Windows should automatically reinstall the device and if you check it, DMA should be turned back on.