Hard drive problem

[Marc]

I just installed a second western digital 500Gb sata2 hard drive (used for
storage and playing music) on my old non-sata supporting pc. I have an amd
athlon xp 2000+1.67 Ghz processor, a foxcom motherboard which does not
support sata, I have a sonata II case which supports sata, 768MB of ram, my
main western digital 160Gb ide hard drive which is formated in fat 32,
partitioned in three drives, and has windows xp os installed on the c drive.
I installed a pci serial ata host controller card on a pci slot on my
motherboard and connected the controller card to the sata hard drive. I
formated the 500Gb sata drive in fat 32 with one primary partition using
western digital data life guard tools. I ended up transferring around 160Gb
of music files to this drive from my western digital 160Gb ide hard drive
and have been using the drive to store and play music for around a month.
But now when I try using the sata drive or playing music it slows my whole
system down to a crawl, the system is unusuable. However, when I unplug the
sata drive the rest of the system works fine. So I disconnected the sata
drive and now my system with the ide hard drive - all of the drives have
been defragmented - is working fine. I was suspecting that the reason the
system was slow was because the 500Gb sata drive is fragmented. However, I
don't know how to go about defragging the 500Gb sata hard drive since my
defragger (diskeeper) is on the 160Gb ide hard drive - the drive which has
my winxp operating system and diskeeper.
Is there anyone that can give me a solution to this problem?
Thanks,
Marc

 

[philo]

I just installed a second western digital 500Gb sata2 hard drive (used for
storage and playing music) on my old non-sata supporting pc. I have an amd
athlon xp 2000+1.67 Ghz processor, a foxcom motherboard which does not
support sata, I have a sonata II case which supports sata, 768MB of ram, my
main western digital 160Gb ide hard drive which is formated in fat 32,
partitioned in three drives, and has windows xp os installed on the c drive.
I installed a pci serial ata host controller card on a pci slot on my
motherboard and connected the controller card to the sata hard drive. I
formated the 500Gb sata drive in fat 32 with one primary partition using
western digital data life guard tools. I ended up transferring around 160Gb
of music files to this drive from my western digital 160Gb ide hard drive
and have been using the drive to store and play music for around a month.
But now when I try using the sata drive or playing music it slows my whole
system down to a crawl, the system is unusuable. However, when I unplug the
sata drive the rest of the system works fine. So I disconnected the sata
drive and now my system with the ide hard drive - all of the drives have
been defragmented - is working fine. I was suspecting that the reason the
system was slow was because the 500Gb sata drive is fragmented. However, I
don't know how to go about defragging the 500Gb sata hard drive since my
defragger (diskeeper) is on the 160Gb ide hard drive - the drive which has
my winxp operating system and diskeeper.
Is there anyone that can give me a solution to this problem?
Thanks,
Marc

First off make sure the proper chipset drivers are being used for your SATA
controller...
you may be running in the PIO mode

Second. It's a very bad idea to use fat32 ...
you definately want to go with NTFS

Thirdly. It makes NO difference on what drive your defrag application is
installed...
you can use to it defrag any drive

 

[Marc]

First off make sure the proper chipset drivers are being used for your
SATA
controller...
you may be running in the PIO mode

Second. It's a very bad idea to use fat32 ...
you definately want to go with NTFS

Thirdly. It makes NO difference on what drive your defrag application is
installed...
you can use to it defrag any drive

I got diskeeper to recognize the sata drive. I'm defragging the sata drive.
I'm thinking of transferring some music files to my other drives and using
the ide drive to listen to music and I'll get some more ram. Perhaps the
combination of ripping several movies and playing mp3's took up too many
resources and caused the whole system to crash. Now that I disconnected and
reconnected the sata drive to the pci sata controller and rebooted it seems
to be working okay.

The reason I'm using fat 32 is because some of the software and games I have
need fat 32.
I know ntfs is more stable and does not need defragging but what about the
software and games I'm using do I replace them all?

 

[Chris Hill]

I just installed a second western digital 500Gb sata2 hard drive (used for
storage and playing music) on my old non-sata supporting pc. I have an amd
athlon xp 2000+1.67 Ghz processor, a foxcom motherboard which does not
support sata, I have a sonata II case which supports sata, 768MB of ram, my
main western digital 160Gb ide hard drive which is formated in fat 32,
partitioned in three drives, and has windows xp os installed on the c drive.
I installed a pci serial ata host controller card on a pci slot on my
motherboard and connected the controller card to the sata hard drive. I
formated the 500Gb sata drive in fat 32 with one primary partition using
western digital data life guard tools. I ended up transferring around 160Gb
of music files to this drive from my western digital 160Gb ide hard drive
and have been using the drive to store and play music for around a month.
But now when I try using the sata drive or playing music it slows my whole
system down to a crawl, the system is unusuable. However, when I unplug the
sata drive the rest of the system works fine. So I disconnected the sata
drive and now my system with the ide hard drive - all of the drives have
been defragmented - is working fine. I was suspecting that the reason the
system was slow was because the 500Gb sata drive is fragmented. However, I
don't know how to go about defragging the 500Gb sata hard drive since my
defragger (diskeeper) is on the 160Gb ide hard drive - the drive which has
my winxp operating system and diskeeper.
Is there anyone that can give me a solution to this problem?

No reason the program couldn't defrag the other drive. I'd bet $100
that fragmentation has nothing to do with your problem. Either you
changed a driver and it screwed up something or the drive is going
bad. Start out by using the data lifeguard diagnostics on the drive.

 

[Marc]

No reason the program couldn't defrag the other drive. I'd bet $100
that fragmentation has nothing to do with your problem. Either you
changed a driver and it screwed up something or the drive is going
bad. Start out by using the data lifeguard diagnostics on the drive.

The funny thing was that I guess my system crashed and then when I rebooted
the system
it remained in that slow crashed mode and diskeeper was not recognizing the
sata drive.
The problem was not because of defragmentation, since the 500Gb sata hard
drive
was hardly defragmented according to diskeeper. The problem was probably due
to some software glitch due to using too many resouces ripping, playing
music,
browsing, and playing online games. Everything seems to be working fine now
since I reconnected the sata drive to the controller.

 

[philo]

I got diskeeper to recognize the sata drive. I'm defragging the sata drive.
I'm thinking of transferring some music files to my other drives and using
the ide drive to listen to music and I'll get some more ram. Perhaps the
combination of ripping several movies and playing mp3's took up too many
resources and caused the whole system to crash. Now that I disconnected and
reconnected the sata drive to the pci sata controller and rebooted it seems
to be working okay.

The reason I'm using fat 32 is because some of the software and games I have
need fat 32.
I know ntfs is more stable and does not need defragging but what about the
software and games I'm using do I replace them all?

Well first off , NTFS does need defragging too.
But the advantages of NTFS are numerous.

It has better fault tolerance and security.
Much better cluser size on a large volume. (In other words less wasted
space)

Plus...since you are storing movies and MP3s...
Fat32 has a file siz limit of 4 gigs. NTFS has no such limits.

Did you actually try to run your applications on an NTFS partition???
If for whatever reason you need to have fat32...
Then I'd setup a drive that had several partitions on it and perhaps great
one smaller partition that's fat32