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HELP! Slowest HD

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  • Hard Drives
  • HD
  • Storage
Last response: in Storage
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March 30, 2003 2:49:35 PM

I have recently bought a new PC (Asus 533-PE, 2.4 GHz Pentium IV, Maxtor 120GB ata 133, 512MB ram). The OS is XP.
I noticed the HD was kinda slow, but I was really stunned when I checked the transfer rate under PerformanceTest: 3-6 Mbyte/sec!! I have tried upgrading all drivers (including BIOS), but nothing changed. I even tried connecting the HD to the on board raid controller, but no luck.
Can anybody help? Is my drive defective or is it an OS problem?

Thanx

More about : slowest

March 30, 2003 5:54:26 PM

Right click on MY Computer, select Properties, then Hardware and Device Manager. Find your IDE controller on the hardware list, check in the primary and secondary controllers Advanced tabs and be sure you have them selected to "DMA if available"... reboot and check again to see if DMA is actually enabled.

In your bios... take the hard disk off "AUTO". Depending on the BIOS you will find either a menu selction for "Detect IDE devices" (or similar) or you can go into your Standard CMOS Setup and mark the left most field of each IDE device and press ENTER to detect them. Once you do this, be sure the UDMA mode is enabled.

This should fix your problem.






--->It ain't better if it don't work<---
March 31, 2003 9:51:40 AM

Thanx for the answer. I tried to find the 'advanced' tab on my IDE controller in control panel, but there is none (the driver is part of an Intel utility - application accelerator, and it does not appear to have any settings).
I killed the AUTO feature on the BIOS and checked if UDMA was set (it was indeed set to 5): the transfer rate is still 9 Mbyte though.
March 31, 2003 3:00:39 PM

Ok... more things to check/try...


Here's a more exact path to those IDE settings...

Control panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager, IDE ata/atapi controllers, Primary IDE Channel, Advanced settings.

Check if it says "Ultra DMA mode" or "PIO mode"

If it's the latter flip the Transfer Mode over to "DMA if available".

Repeat for the secondary IDE.

close everything and Reboot.


Another possibility is your cables. If you are not using the 80 wire IDE cables, most controllers will no longer enable DMA. So make sure you've got the new cables as well.

Although it's rare, I've also seen problems with systems where the drive jumpers are set to "Cable Select" instead of "Master" or "Slave". If your HD is your boot device it should be the master drive on the primary channel. Anything else on that cable must be the slave.

Do you have the IDE chipset drivers installed? If you do, try removing them and see what you get. If not put them in and see what happens...

Finally, if you are on XP with NTFS, are you running drive compression? This is a cool feature for crowded systems but there is a nasty performance hit for it. What I do is compress only seldom used files... help files, dllcache, etc.


hope this helps...





--->It ain't better if it don't work<---
!