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Hard Drive slowed down badly

post #1 of 4
2/14/13 at 11:31am
Thread Starter 
Running XP SP3 on HTPC used mainly for recording/viewing OTA HD TV.
OS on 50GB partition on 750GB Seagate SATA drive, rest of drive used for storage (D drive). Drive is old - at least 3 years but possibly up to 5.
Started having problems watching shows recorded on the D drive (I have 2 other drives also used for storage and 2 external for backup and their speeds were fine). No changes had been made to system for some time.
Also noticed slowdown when an Adobe update was being installed.
Ran diagnostics which were slow but no errors.
Ran ATTO and speeds were ridiculously low (2Mbps).
Tried reformatting the D partition and aligning but made no difference.
Replaced drive with a WD 750 drive (old one I kept as spare) and speeds were back up to normal. OS partition was copied from problem Seagate drive.
Put the problem Seagate drive in another system to test and the speeds were back to normal.

Would have chalked it off to bad drive if it hadn't run well in the other system.
Scratching my head over this one. Any explanations would be appreciated.

.
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post #2 of 4
2/15/13 at 8:48am

Could have been the HDD was horribly fragmented given XP doesn't manage that for you.  Also, you say you "copied" the OS - was that via clone or fresh install?  A fresh install is often an option when things get slow as you stated - drivers can get corrupted.  Did you check if the drive was in PIO mode prior to removing it?  When the system has issue with transferring data the OS will degrade the interface from DMA ACCESS all the way to PIO mode.

 

Glad you're back running!   

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post #3 of 4
2/16/13 at 8:25am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Hornfeck View Post

Could have been the HDD was horribly fragmented given XP doesn't manage that for you.  Also, you say you "copied" the OS - was that via clone or fresh install?  A fresh install is often an option when things get slow as you stated - drivers can get corrupted.  Did you check if the drive was in PIO mode prior to removing it?  When the system has issue with transferring data the OS will degrade the interface from DMA ACCESS all the way to PIO mode.

Glad you're back running!   

Thanks for the response. I copied the OS partition, not a fresh install. Fragmentation not an issue since I cleaned off the 2nd partition by reformatting and it still read slow. Also, I take care of fragmentation fairly frequently. When I put the new drive in, nothing was changed (cables, bios settings, etc). In fact the bios even picked up the new drive as the boot drive even though there are 4 other drives in the system.

AFAIK all drives were set to DMA access if available, but I did not check to see if one of them had changed, so maybe it did fall back to PIO for some reason and that makes sense. Thanks for the reminder. If it happens again I'll check for that. Just wondering what caused it to fall back since I wasn't getting any errors on either partition and nothing was changed in the system..
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post #4 of 4
2/17/13 at 9:45am
Quote:
Originally Posted by lsilvest View Post

Running XP SP3 on HTPC used mainly for recording/viewing OTA HD TV.
OS on 50GB partition on 750GB Seagate SATA drive, rest of drive used for storage (D drive). Drive is old - at least 3 years but possibly up to 5.
Started having problems watching shows recorded on the D drive (I have 2 other drives also used for storage and 2 external for backup and their speeds were fine). No changes had been made to system for some time.
Also noticed slowdown when an Adobe update was being installed.
Ran diagnostics which were slow but no errors.
Ran ATTO and speeds were ridiculously low (2Mbps).
Tried reformatting the D partition and aligning but made no difference.
Replaced drive with a WD 750 drive (old one I kept as spare) and speeds were back up to normal. OS partition was copied from problem Seagate drive.
Put the problem Seagate drive in another system to test and the speeds were back to normal.

Would have chalked it off to bad drive if it hadn't run well in the other system.
Scratching my head over this one. Any explanations would be appreciated.

.

How is your HDD mounted in the chassis? Vibration (including rotational) can have a severe impact on disk throughput.
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