Very slow hard drive performance on Acer Aspire 9410

T

Tom Kennedy

This is my first post. I may not be giving the needed information for anyone
to reply. If more information is needed I will gladly provide it.

My Acer Aspire 9410 laptop came with Windows Vista installed. I have had a
lot of problems with Vista so I decided to change to Windows XP.
The installation seemed to go fine but now the hard drive is very slow if
you are copying a lot of files. I have a small photo studio and I copy about
4 gig of files for every wedding. On Vista it would take maybe 6 or 7
minutes. On XP it would take probably a couple of hours.

I may not be using the right terms to say this but it is like there is a
buffer that fills up. The first few files may copy quickly and then
suddenly the process slows tremendously and the time remaining starts to
climb very quickly. It behaves the same no matter what I am copying from or
to. I can copy from C: to C:, from C: to my external drive, from my external
to C:, from memory card to C:, from memory card to external, it all acts the
same.

For maybe 30 seconds it goes very well then it nearly stops. I don't mean
it slows down by a tiny bit. It goes from megabytes per second to seconds
per megabyte. It probably takes 20 seconds just to copy one image file.
The system is basically unusable for my photo editing and work at my studio
as it is now.

I believe I have installed the latest drivers, and device manager shows no
problems.

The problem does not seem to be intermittent. I have tried the external
drive on different USB ports and it doesn't seem to matter.

I have researched the problem and have found mention of it on other sites.
Unfortunately the links given to download files that were supposed to cure
the problem were not working. I have no idea what to do next. If anyone
could provide any suggestions or guidance I would really appreciate it.

Tom Kennedy
 
D

DL

Did you get drivers from Acer or winupdate, if the latter go get them from
Acer
Does Event Viewer reveal anything?

Were the Vista problems just general or something similar?
 
T

Tom Kennedy

DL, thank you for responding. I got my initial drivers from Acer in Europe.
I wonder if XP Service pack 3 had newer drivers and used them instead. I
looked at the event viewer and it shows a huge number of event 51, event 11
and event 5 listings. I didn't count but I would guess it is over 100. If I
understand correctly, these events pertain to hard drive errors. I can't
prove this but I don't think it is a hard drive problem in the sense of a
hardware malfunction. I can use the same external drive on my desktop and it
runs about 17 megabytes per second. I can use the same card reader on the
desktop and it works fine. I also tried a smaller 400 gig external drive and
it did the same thing. It seems odd that two separate hard drives and two or
three memory cards are all doing the same thing at the same time. Could it
be possible that a software problem is causing the number 51, 11, and 5
events?

I hate to sound so dumb but I just don't know where to look next. Long,
long ago I was a techie through and through but in the past few years I have
not kept up to date and I really am lost on this one.


Tom Kennedy
 
S

Swifty

Tom said:
I have a small photo studio and I copy about
4 gig of files for every wedding. On Vista it would take maybe 6 or 7
minutes. On XP it would take probably a couple of hours.
Click to expand...

I've seen this before somewhere. I have this feeling that Vista included
some mechanism which considerably improved the performance of file
copying. I don't recall the precise details, and it may not be the cause
of your difference. I post this in the hope that it will jog someone
else's memory, better than mine.
 
T

Tom Kennedy

Mr. Swift, thank you for your post. Perhaps it will help someone else to
remember something. I found a thread in another forum that described the
exact same problem but the link to the solution offered by another poster was
broken. I wish I could go back to it for reference but I have been in so
many sites in the past several hours I have forgotten where it was.


Tom Kennedy
 
G

Gerry

Tom

You might post copies of the actual Event Viewer reports.

A tip for posting copies of Error Reports! Run Event Viewer and double
click on the error you want to copy. In the window, which appears is a
button resembling two pages. Click the button and close Event
Viewer.Now start your message (email) and do a paste into the body of
the message. Make sure this is the first paste after exiting from
Event Viewer.



--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
T

Tom Kennedy

Gerry, this is from event viewer. I hope it is what you requested.


Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 51
Date: 11/14/2008
Time: 11:36:05 PM
User: N/A
Computer: LAPTOP
Description:
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 04 00 68 00 01 00 b6 00 ..h...¶.
0008: 00 00 00 00 33 00 04 80 ....3..€
0010: 2d 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 -.......
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 de d5 83 12 00 00 00 .ÞՃ....
0028: bc 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 ¼.......
0030: ff ff ff ff 03 00 00 00 ÿÿÿÿ....
0038: 40 00 00 82 02 00 00 00 @..‚....
0040: 00 20 0a 12 80 03 20 40 . ..€. @
0048: 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 ........
0050: 00 00 00 00 60 17 ec 88 ....`.ìˆ
0058: 00 00 00 00 30 15 ec 88 ....0.ìˆ
0060: 00 00 00 00 ef ea 41 09 ....ïêA.
0068: 2a 00 09 41 ea ef 00 00 *..Aêï..
0070: 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 €.......
0078: f0 00 0b 00 00 00 00 0b ð.......
0080: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0088: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........



This is another entry.


Event Type: Error
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 11
Date: 11/14/2008
Time: 11:21:51 PM
User: N/A
Computer: LAPTOP
Description:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 04 00 68 00 01 00 b6 00 ..h...¶.
0008: 00 00 00 00 0b 00 04 c0 .......À
0010: 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 4e 33 ac 11 00 00 00 .N3¬....
0028: 3b 2c 00 00 00 00 00 00 ;,......
0030: ff ff ff ff 03 00 00 00 ÿÿÿÿ....
0038: 40 00 00 8f 02 00 00 00 @..Â....
0040: 00 20 0a 12 80 03 20 40 . ..€. @
0048: 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 ........
0050: 00 00 00 00 90 66 e8 88 ....Âfèˆ
0058: 00 00 00 00 60 64 e8 88 ....`dèˆ
0060: 02 00 00 00 a7 19 d6 08 ....§.Ö.
0068: 2a 00 08 d6 19 a7 00 00 *..Ö.§..
0070: 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 €.......
0078: f0 00 04 00 00 00 00 0b ð.......
0080: 00 00 00 00 08 03 00 00 ........
0088: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........



I hope this helps. Thank you for your response.


Tom Kennedy
 
W

who?

Swifty said:
I've seen this before somewhere. I have this feeling that Vista included
some mechanism which considerably improved the performance of file
copying. I don't recall the precise details, and it may not be the cause
of your difference. I post this in the hope that it will jog someone
else's memory, better than mine.
Click to expand...


I've read that Microsoft improved the file copying algorithm for Vista, but
I've also read that, despite that, it's not much better than XP.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=369

To the OP: Have you only one Gig of RAM?
I strongly suspect that you'll notice an improvement in performance if you
add another Gig of RAM.
 
T

Tom Kennedy

I have 2 1/2 gig of ram and a 500 gig hard drive. The processor is a 2.00
ghz dual core if I remember right. There is a lot of free space on the hard
drive, probably about 400 gig. I do not have a lot of applications open
that would be eating up the available ram.

Thanks for the response. Maybe with your help I can get this mess sorted
out.

Tom Kennedy
 
T

Tom Kennedy

Gerry, I checked device manager and I have no exclamation marks. I looked
at the link and I wonderif it might have something in it that is worth
trying. I also have a built in card reader like was mentioned in the
article. I will try disabling it and see if that makes any difference.

Also, last night before giving up and going to bed, I have done a clean
install of Windows XP Service pack 3. I just let the install procedure run
as it wanted. I did not change any options or anything from start to finish.
Immediately after the install completed I attempted copying files from
place to place and the hard drive was very, very slow. A copy of 1 gigabyte
of image files took about 20 minutes. Normally that should take about 1 to
1 1/2 minutes.

The part about the drive carrier in the article is also worth checking. I
will remove my drive from the carrier in the laptop and then reboot and see
what happens. It won't take but a minute or two and it might make a
difference.

Thanks for your suggestions. I appreciate the help from all those that have
responded.


Tom Kennedy
 
G

Gerry

Tom

Please let me know you get on.

Are you using any cabling between the USB port and the device. Cabling
for USB 2.00 is different to that for USB 1.00. If you have USB 1.00 it
will slow the process down.


--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
T

Tom Kennedy

DL, that is a good thought. I haven't tried that. I will fire up the laptop
and see what happens.

Probably being silly but if I had a Windows XP disk that was older than
service pack 3 I would be tempted to do an install from it and see if service
pack 3 loads something that the laptop doesn't like.

OK, I tried safe mode and doing a copy. It behaved the same.

I saw something on another forum about changing a hard drive option in the
bios to and from something called ACHI to IDE at the time of install. My
bios has no such option. I updated my bios last night on the suggestion of
Acer support. I still have no option for ACHI or IDE that I can find.
Also, updating the bios seemed to have no effect on anything in any way. I
guess it served a purpose but I can't tell that anything is either better or
worse.

I have been roaming the internet and I can't find anything helpful. I did
find a site called instructables that had a set of instructions for
converting an Acer from Vista to XP but it wasn't for my model. Just in the
hope that someone there might have an idea I posted my problem on the
instructables site under the Vista to XP article. So far I have not had any
responses.

Tom Kennedy
 
T

Tom Kennedy

Gerry, I may have accidentally misled you in my earlier posts. I do have a
cable between my external drive and my usb port on my laptop but it is a usb
2.0 cable. The problem is not just copying from my internal drive to my
external drive. It is copying from any where to any where. I could make 2
folders on my C: drive and name them "one" and "two". Then if I tried to copy
from folder "one" to folder "two" it would be very slow. It would be the
same if I put one folder on my C: drive and the other on my external drive
and then copied from internal to external or vice versa.

Kind of getting to the point that I don't know what to do. If you folks
get tired of helping with this I will understand.

Tom Kennedy
 
W

who?

I experienced similar problems some time ago when I had only 256MB of RAM in
my laptop with XP. Now, I know you have loads of RAM but I wonder if it is
being used. Maybe your system is wrongly configured, or perhaps one memory
stick is faulty.

Try a big copy operation but open Windows Task Manager first and take a look
at PFusage in the performance tab. If your PFusage climbs higher and higher
when the copy slows down, then I would say your system is not using your RAM
correctly. If page file usage does not increase much then I guess you can
say that RAM is being used correctly and the RAM is good.

If RAM is good and no other ideas are forthcoming then you might like to try
this program:
http://techblissonline.com/copy-files-faster-and-easily-in-windows-vista-or-xp-with-teracopy/

I have no experience with it but might be worth a try.
 
T

Tom Kennedy

I'll try that just as soon as I can get a second free. I am at my photo
studio right now and have a senior portrait session in just a few minutes.

It sounds like a good suggestion to me, and is one I hadn't considered. My
systems is configured with one 2 gig stick of ram and one 512 meg stick of
ram. If the 2 gig stick is either loose or has failed I would be operating
on just 512 meg and that could really slow things down.

I hope this is the solution. It would be easy to fix.

Thank you for the suggestion.


Tom Kennedy
 
W

who?

who? said:
I experienced similar problems some time ago when I had only 256MB of RAM
in
my laptop with XP. Now, I know you have loads of RAM but I wonder if it is
being used. Maybe your system is wrongly configured, or perhaps one memory
stick is faulty.

Try a big copy operation but open Windows Task Manager first and take a
look
at PFusage in the performance tab. If your PFusage climbs higher and
higher
when the copy slows down, then I would say your system is not using your
RAM
correctly. If page file usage does not increase much then I guess you can
say that RAM is being used correctly and the RAM is good.

If RAM is good and no other ideas are forthcoming then you might like to
try
this program:
http://techblissonline.com/copy-files-faster-and-easily-in-windows-vista-or-xp-with-teracopy/

I have no experience with it but might be worth a try.
Click to expand...

Another thought: .. the flip side to RAM versus Page File is that, if you
have not allocated enough MBs for your Page File then PFUsage will remain
constant during the copy operation. The usual recommendation is to "Allow XP
to allocate the size of the PageFile" in advanced performance settings.
(system properties)
 
T

Tom Kennedy

I checked my pagefile usage and it didn't really move up much. It climbed
about 5 meg during a 1 gig copy. I also checked my ram and it is reporting
as 2.49 gig.

I think I may have found something. I don't really understand it exactly
but it sounds an awfully lot like the problem I have.

There is a post on a forum from a person with an Acer Aspire 9410, the same
as my laptop. His hard drives were switching from DMA mode to PIO mode
randomly. It sounded like he was having the same problem as me so I booted
up and checked device manager. My hard drive was listed as Ultra DMA 5. I
closed device manager and started a 1 gig file copy. I then reopened device
manager and checked my hard drive. It was listed as being in PIO mode but to
use DMA if it was available. I did some research on transfer rates on PIO
mode and it is pretty slow. I think maybe that is my problem. I have no
idea how to cure it but it sure sounds like my problem.

I will try to research it farther later on tonight.

If anyone has any suggestions for me to try or has any questions I would be
glad to try to do anything I can to help.'

Tom Kennedy
 
W

who?

Tom Kennedy said:
I checked my pagefile usage and it didn't really move up much. It climbed
about 5 meg during a 1 gig copy. I also checked my ram and it is
reporting
as 2.49 gig.

I think I may have found something. I don't really understand it exactly
but it sounds an awfully lot like the problem I have.

There is a post on a forum from a person with an Acer Aspire 9410, the
same
as my laptop. His hard drives were switching from DMA mode to PIO mode
randomly. It sounded like he was having the same problem as me so I
booted
up and checked device manager. My hard drive was listed as Ultra DMA 5.
I
closed device manager and started a 1 gig file copy. I then reopened
device
manager and checked my hard drive. It was listed as being in PIO mode but
to
use DMA if it was available. I did some research on transfer rates on PIO
mode and it is pretty slow. I think maybe that is my problem. I have no
idea how to cure it but it sure sounds like my problem.

I will try to research it farther later on tonight.

If anyone has any suggestions for me to try or has any questions I would
be
glad to try to do anything I can to help.'

Tom Kennedy

:
Click to expand...


Aha, I haven't heard of that before. Looks like this web page has a fix for
you:
http://hdrlab.org.nz/windows-has-become-very-slow-ide-drive-has-switched-from-dma-to-pio-mode/

Linked from that page there's a faster fix here:
http://winhlp.com/node/10

let us know how it goes
good luck
 

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