250GB in ancient pc is really slow

N

nismohks

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2003
Messages
350
i have a AMD athlon 800 in an asus A7v M/B with 512 sd ram and various cd drives and a crappy graphics card. anyway thats not the point. the computer has 4 ide ports, the standard priamry and secondary as well as an onboard PROMISE ULTRA DMA/100 chip

on the computer i have 3 hard drives:

80GB Maxtor - Secondary ULTRA ATA100 IDE
120 GB Seagate - Primary ULTRA ATA100 IDE
250 GB Seagate - Primary IDE

now windows xp sp2 with all the updates recognises the drives and are fine. however performance is really slow on the 250gb hard drive, like i can watch .avi files and such off it with ease and cpu usage won't be THAT much ~ 40% but say if i transfer a 350MB file from the MAxtor 80GB to the 250gb seagate, it will take 100% cpu usage and the transfer will take around 2.5 mins to finish which is quite ridiculous considering if i transfer a 350mb file from the maxtor to the 120gb it only takes 1 minute.

also when i try to download a torrent on to the 250gb HD its really slow... it slows teh system a LOT, but if i save to the 80gb maxtor everything is fine.

i have updated the VIA hyperionPro drivers for the onboard KT133 chip already and even updated the PROMISE driver for the ULTRA ATA controller within windows.


i dont know what i can do?

help?
 
I have an old Athlon T-Bird 1GHz still running on the Asus A7V133. I remember reading a long time ago on another AMD forum that there's apparently some problem transferring large files (say >100MB) across HDs located on Primary & Secondary channels. Your description fits the bill i.e. your 80GB is on Secondary and 250GB on Primary. Apparently, there's some problem with the controller itself, and it's not a driver problem. When copying large files across channels, either the PC hard locks or experiences slowdowns (i.e. high CPU utilization).

I think you can do a search either on the Via website or Google some dedicated AMD forums.
___________________________________________
#1 (2005) : Athlon64 3000+ (Venice) : ABIT AN8 Ultra (BIOS #18, nForce v6.70) : 1GB Mushkin PC3200 : Galaxy GeForce 6600GT : SoundBlaster X-Fi Extreme : Sony DRU-800A : WD 200GB SATA2 : Thermaltake Shark : Thermaltake TWV 430W : Dell 2005FPW : So far, so good ...
#2 (2003) : P4 2.4B (Northwood) : ABIT BH7 (i845PE) : 1GB Mushkin PC2700 : MSI GeForce4 Ti 4200 : Imation 16x DVDR DL : Seagate Barracuda 80GB SATA : Thermaltake 420W : Dell 1704FPT
 
but moving files between the 80gb and the 120gb is fine, unusually enough.

and also when i download from Bittorrent on to the 250 it makes my computer slow as well
 
Check your DMA settings, make sure you're not in PIO mode.

Finally, run HDTach on the 250gb drive or some similar benchmark.
 
Yeah the 100% CPU thing sounds like DMA is not on. If you don't use DMA, all drive reads and writes have to be processed by the CPU to get in and out of memory, yay!
 
oyh yea DMA was not on. but i cant enable it. i chosse DMA if avaialble and restart yet it stays on PIO mode. what should i do?
 
ok i found out in the event manager that the drive was experiencing errors which is why windows won't let it use DMA on that drive.

these are the errors

Event Type: Error
Event Source: atapi
Event Category: None
Event ID: 11
Date: 3/1/2006
Time: 11:01:10 PM
User: N/A
Computer: HACHIROKU
Description:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and the error below i have 5 consecutive reptitions right after the error above which follows that windows will force a drive into PIO mode after 6 errors
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Event Type: Error
Event Source: atapi
Event Category: None
Event ID: 9
Date: 3/1/2006
Time: 11:01:10 PM
User: N/A
Computer: HACHIROKU
Description:
The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.







anything i should do? any ideas?

i replaced the ide cable already
 
Sounds like the controller your using is either on the fritz or dying. Try another controller on the board or pick up a PCI IDE controller. Also sounds like you dont have DMA enabled.

Those errors pretty much mean the PC was trying to contact the drive but had trouble getting what it needed from the controller your HD is hooked to. Try checking your DMA settings could be its in PIO and couldn't contact the drive in time because you were using too much CPU time and the request timed out. If this doesn't work try another controller.
 
Any chance that you're forcing PIO mode in bios accidentally?

Otherwise sounds like either the controller (more likely) or the drive (less likely) is going bad.
 
well i hoep the drive is fine, its only new!

the board on the other hand is quite old hahah would it also be because of a an older board using a high capacity drive?

because i remember that the computer wouldnt recognise the whole drive at first, and then i forgot what i did but somehow the whole drive was detected and i also saw on the ASUS forums that the motherboard only supports up to 180gb or something. no idea.

also would using the drive in PIO mode stuff up the hard drive contents? like as long as its not bad for the drive it wont bother me as much since im not reading and writing to that drive often, its just used as a storage/backup drive for my media and stuff.

thanx
 
i just used the seagate online diagnostic thing and it says that the drive is fine


also, if when u say that the controller is stuffed, wouldnt the other drives be affected too? all my other drives are on DMA
 
nismohks said:
i just used the seagate online diagnostic thing and it says that the drive is fine


also, if when u say that the controller is stuffed, wouldnt the other drives be affected too? all my other drives are on DMA
Click to expand...
I'm not sure, but it could be that the controller doesn't really support that big of a drive like you said. That could cause it to be unable to communicate with DMA, but when it steps down to PIO it could work.

DMA-Direct Memory Access
PIO-Programmed Input-Output

DMA the controller can make requests to memory without the CPU. PIO the CPU needs to process all the I/O commands.

To my knowledge, there's no reason to think that PIO would hurt a hard drive in any way other than performance.
 
1. Make sure you're using an 80-wire ATA66/100/133 cable for the drive in question.
2. Try jumpering the drives CSEL (Cable select) and then place them on the cable according to how you want them. Blue connector to mobo/controller - grey (middle) connector to slave - Black (end) connector to Master.
 
superkdogg said:
I'm not sure, but it could be that the controller doesn't really support that big of a drive like you said. That could cause it to be unable to communicate with DMA, but when it steps down to PIO it could work.
Click to expand...
I doubt it. The transfer mode has little to do with the size of the drive.
 
its soo annoying, the performance of the drive, even fast forwarding in xvid files takes a few extra seconds more!

im already using an ata133 ide cable, but i'll try the cable select thing.

strange how you suggested cable select though, is it better than setting the masters and slaves manually?
 
nismohks said:
its soo annoying, the performance of the drive, even fast forwarding in xvid files takes a few extra seconds more!

im already using an ata133 ide cable, but i'll try the cable select thing.

strange how you suggested cable select though, is it better than setting the masters and slaves manually?
Click to expand...

Ideally it shouldn't matter, but back when ATA66 first came about there were a lot of compatability problems with drives falling out of DMA mode and reverting to PIO mode, and jumpering them cable select and using the positioning method on the cable seemed to resolve them for many people.

I use cable select in all cases these days when using an PATA66/100/133+ cable and drives.
 
ok here are the results:

with cable select, its the same and stays in PIO mode, even after uninstalling the controller and reinstalling it. the same errors in the event viewer come up

when i change the drive to be on the Secondary IDE, and the cd drives on the Primary IDE, windows won't boot up


when i put the drive into the Slave ULTRA ATA IDE windows also won't boot up

any ideas?
 
Try swaping the 250 drive with your 80 drive. See what happens if you haven't already.
 
i think he wants you to switch the drives so that they are on opposite channels. Put the 250 on where the 80 is now and VV.
 
i pulled out the 80gb and i plugged in the 250gb, and when the computer is starting up, it can detect the 250gb, then it will go to the windows xp start up screen where there is a blue par that moves around down the bottom, and then the computer just hangs while the blue bar keeps on moving.

the hard drive light is turned on in front of the computer and it doesnt move anymore.

any ideas?
 
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