One very slow harddisk (3Mb/s)

[Berco Beute]

In my computer I have two identical 250Gb harddisks (Maxtor 6Y250M0,
SATA, 7200 rpm), but one is running very slow. Using benchmarking tool
'Sandra' from Sisoftware the first disk shows a throughput of around 3
MB/s and the other around 53 MB/s.

The first disk used to work fine, but all of the sudden it became
extraordinary slow. I've checked the following:

- Defragged the disk
- Checked for virusses.
- Checked for errors.
- Checked with Maxtor (now Seagate) tools for drive healthyness: OK.

The rest of the system seems to be just fine (according to
Sisoftware's Sandra): memory, processor, video, audio, etc.

One thing I haven't tried is reinstalling the driver for the first
harddisk since I'm afraid I'll lose the data on the disk.

Any pointers regarding what could be the problem are very welcome.

Cheers!

 

[Jim]

In my computer I have two identical 250Gb harddisks (Maxtor 6Y250M0,
SATA, 7200 rpm), but one is running very slow. Using benchmarking tool
'Sandra' from Sisoftware the first disk shows a throughput of around 3
MB/s and the other around 53 MB/s.

The first disk used to work fine, but all of the sudden it became
extraordinary slow. I've checked the following:

- Defragged the disk
- Checked for virusses.
- Checked for errors.
- Checked with Maxtor (now Seagate) tools for drive healthyness: OK.

The rest of the system seems to be just fine (according to
Sisoftware's Sandra): memory, processor, video, audio, etc.

One thing I haven't tried is reinstalling the driver for the first
harddisk since I'm afraid I'll lose the data on the disk.

Any pointers regarding what could be the problem are very welcome.

Cheers!

Have you investigated what mode the driver is using? Your drive seems to
be locked in PIO mode.

The reason for PIO mode is that, sometime in the past, the drive reported
an excessive error rate. XP then reverts to PIO mode and stays there. The
solution is to delete the driver and reboot.
During the boot up, XP will load a driver from the \i386 folder and resume
with DMA mode. This is the fix for a driver that will not change to DMA
(and not the fix for anything else).

Just because the drive is not reporting errors now is no sign that it did
not do that in the past.

Jim

 

[JS]

Try HD Tune, provides drive info and has an option to test your drive.
http://www.hdtune.com/

Also SpeedFan has an online analysis feature for hard drives.
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

JS

 

[Bob Willard]

In my computer I have two identical 250Gb harddisks (Maxtor 6Y250M0,
SATA, 7200 rpm), but one is running very slow. Using benchmarking tool
'Sandra' from Sisoftware the first disk shows a throughput of around 3
MB/s and the other around 53 MB/s.

The first disk used to work fine, but all of the sudden it became
extraordinary slow. I've checked the following:

- Defragged the disk
- Checked for virusses.
- Checked for errors.
- Checked with Maxtor (now Seagate) tools for drive healthyness: OK.

The rest of the system seems to be just fine (according to
Sisoftware's Sandra): memory, processor, video, audio, etc.

One thing I haven't tried is reinstalling the driver for the first
harddisk since I'm afraid I'll lose the data on the disk.

Any pointers regarding what could be the problem are very welcome.

Cheers!

Sandra is not a good disk benchmark. Before trying anything else,
I suggest running HDtach, which is a disk benchmark; run it on both of
your HDs, while no apps are running (only the OS). The graphs should
show if one of the HDs has a bunch of bad sectors, as the retries will
cause downward spikes in performance. Also, if one HD is running in
PIO mode, that will cause very high CPU use.

 

[Berco Beute]

Have you investigated what mode the driver is using? Your drive seems to
be locked in PIO mode.

The reason for PIO mode is that, sometime in the past, the drive reported
an excessive error rate. XP then reverts to PIO mode and stays there. The
solution is to delete the driver and reboot.
During the boot up, XP will load a driver from the \i386 folder and resume
with DMA mode. This is the fix for a driver that will not change to DMA
(and not the fix for anything else).

Just because the drive is not reporting errors now is no sign that it did
not do that in the past.

Jim

Thank you very much.
In the meantime I solved the issue by connecting the slow disk to
another SATA port. I'm not sure if that made Windows reload the driver
or that the old port was really broken.