slow HD

[Bill Bartlett]

My first name brand computer is a Comquat Presario SR1575GL. I started out
with a ABS (before they were name brand) 10 meg hrtz AT and slowly upgraded
it to a 1 gig hrtz AMD with XP . And then it blew a power supply which fried
my latest motherboard and HD, so I bought the Comquat SR1575Gl. I thought
it was a good brand. This is a miserable machine. First it was loaded with
garbage ware, which was hard for me to dig out I may have dug out stuff I
needed. The machine takes 5 min to boot. It seems to run OK, but is slow.
I have tried all the normal things, such as removing most of the start-up
programs, turn off indexing, de fragmenting, run various virus scans, etc. I
ran Seagate's various HD programs which said the HD is OK.
Machine specs:
Processor 2.4 gig AMD Athelon 64 drive 0, ST320082AS an SATA NTFS
drive 1 Maxtor 6l200PO IDE NTFS
Now here is the interesting thing. Benchmarking programs (HD tune 2.54 and
others) show the boot drive running a a transfer rate of 3.4 MG/sec, access
time 15.9 ms with a 96.3 CPU usage
Drive 1 on the same machine shows transfer rate 50.8 access time 15.6 ms and
CPU usage of .3.4
any idea of what is wrong with drive 0? since it is on a cumquat machine
there is no Seagate guarantee on the drive (according to Seagate)
Any help or Ideas would be appreciated.
Bill

 

[Paul]

My first name brand computer is a Comquat Presario SR1575GL. I started
out with a ABS (before they were name brand) 10 meg hrtz AT and slowly
upgraded it to a 1 gig hrtz AMD with XP . And then it blew a power
supply which fried my latest motherboard and HD, so I bought the
Comquat SR1575Gl. I thought it was a good brand. This is a miserable
machine. First it was loaded with garbage ware, which was hard for me to
dig out I may have dug out stuff I needed. The machine takes 5 min to
boot. It seems to run OK, but is slow.
I have tried all the normal things, such as removing most of the
start-up programs, turn off indexing, de fragmenting, run various virus
scans, etc. I ran Seagate's various HD programs which said the HD is OK.
Machine specs:
Processor 2.4 gig AMD Athelon 64 drive 0, ST320082AS an SATA NTFS
drive 1 Maxtor 6l200PO IDE NTFS
Now here is the interesting thing. Benchmarking programs (HD tune 2.54
and others) show the boot drive running a a transfer rate of 3.4 MG/sec,
access time 15.9 ms with a 96.3 CPU usage
Drive 1 on the same machine shows transfer rate 50.8 access time 15.6 ms
and CPU usage of .3.4
any idea of what is wrong with drive 0? since it is on a cumquat
machine there is no Seagate guarantee on the drive (according to Seagate)
Any help or Ideas would be appreciated.
Bill

So it is stuck in PIO mode. If enough errors are detected, in communicating
with the drive, that can be enough to cause windows to crank down the
transfer rate.

See the "Workaround" here, where they uninstall the disk in question, and
let Windows reinstall the driver on the next reboot. (The drive should be
set for "DMA if available".)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472

"WORKAROUND

To re-enable the typical, or faster, transfer mode for an affected device:

1. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then click Computer Management.
2. Click System Tools, and then click Device Manager.
3. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers node.
4. Double-click the controller for which you want to restore the typical DMA transfer mode.
5. Click the Driver tab.
6. Click Uninstall.
7. When the process completes, restart your computer. When Windows restarts,
the hard disk controller is re-enumerated and the transfer mode is reset
to the default value for each device that is connected to the controller."

HTH,
Paul

 

[Bill Bartlett]

Thank you Paul easy fix. I had wasted a lot of my time and local experts
time with the problem (I did check this group and got usual answers) and was
getting ready to replace the hard drive.
I checked my wife's computer (AMD 1.25 GHz and, although it it did not seem
to boot particularly slow it was also set for PIO. How many people out there
are suffering with this problem?
Bill

 

[Paul]

Thank you Paul easy fix. I had wasted a lot of my time and local experts
time with the problem (I did check this group and got usual answers) and
was getting ready to replace the hard drive.
I checked my wife's computer (AMD 1.25 GHz and, although it it did not
seem to boot particularly slow it was also set for PIO. How many people
out there are suffering with this problem?
Bill

I'd say there are a few.

I like the idea of using a hard drive benchmarking program to detect it,
because the 4MB/sec transfer rate is a dead giveaway of "PIO".

Paul