HELP: Western Digital 200GB running at 3.1 MB/sec

R

RandysWay

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 5, 2004
Messages
1,595
My Western Digital 200GB "Caviar" HDD (IDE) is running pathetically slow. I've ran CHKDSK and it found no errors. When I attempt to Defragment the drive, no matter what program I use (including O&O Defrag 8.6) takes at least 30 minutes to Analyze 50% of the drive.

I ran HD Tune and the Benchmark clocked it at a very steady 3.1 MB/sec - almost as if something is keeping it exactly at that speed. Check out how straight the graph is below. I benchmarked my 74GB WD Raptor and my 320GB WD SE16, and both benchmarked at around 65-70 MB/sec.

Here are a few pictures:






Does anybody have any ideas? Hopefully it is a simple fix.

Thank you,
-R
 
Welcome to my world, see my post.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1184757

I wish I could help, but I'm stumped myself.

*EDIT*
The easiest fix would be if it was running in PIO mode and not DMA. Check out the drive via Device manager and see what it says. If you change it and reboot and it's still PIO look for a utility called DMA reset. Hope that's all you need to do to fix it.
 
Major,

Your drive seems to be running way faster than mine. ;) I checked all controllers and made sure they were all running in a DMA mode and not PIO, so it's definitely not that, unfortunately. I just replaced the IDE cable with a brand spankin' new one and the same problem persists. Any other ideas?

Thank you for the reply,

-R
 
RandysWay said:
I ran HD Tune and the Benchmark clocked it at a very steady 3.1 MB/sec - almost as if something is keeping it exactly at that speed.
Click to expand...

PIO mode 0 is 3.3 MB/s. I can't imagine anything else being the cause. Is the new IDE cable a 40-wire or 80-wire? Here's a comparison to make it easier to tell.
 
unhappy_mage said:
PIO mode 0 is 3.3 MB/s. I can't imagine anything else being the cause. Is the new IDE cable a 40-wire or 80-wire? Here's a comparison to make it easier to tell.
Click to expand...

The new (and old) IDE cable is an 80-wire. It would make sense that it would be running in PIO mode, but all IDE Controllers are reporting that they are in an Ultra DMA transfer mode (in the Device Manager) and HD Tune reports that UDMA Mode 6 is active on the drive in question.

The only thing I have noticed thus far, which I have no idea if it makes a difference, is that it reports:

Supported: UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)
Active: UDMA Mode 6 (Ultra ATA/133)

Could this be anything? :confused:


Thanks,
-R
 
Bingo! Fixed it. I went into the BIOS and noticed that the WD2000JB wasn't listed under any of the IDE controllers. I opened the guts back up and saw that there was a jumper on the drive set to slave. I removed the jumper and the drive magically showed up in the BIOS; the HD Tune Benchmark now shows an average of 38.3 MB/sec with a Burst Rate of 67.0 MB/sec. Also, The drive is now running in UDMA Mode 5 (not UDMA Mode 6, as before.)

Thank you to all who replied for the help and ideas.. I'm glad the drive hasn't gone bad -- I've never had one WD drive that failed me.. (Knock on wood!) :D

-R
 
Glad you got it fixed. It's weird it showed up at all in the computer if the jumper wasn't set right.
 
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