Horribly poor performance from Hard Drive

SoooopahflySoooopahfly
edited June 2003 in Hardware
First heres my setup:
ABIT KT7-RAID
1GHz TBird
512MB RAM
i run two cdroms on IDE1 and 2, then i run two separate harddrives on the RAID IDE3 and 4, the OS one is on IDE3.

Im using a Western Digital hard drive, the special edition one with 8 MB cache [ATA100]. I am experiencing horrible performance, and when i ran some SANDRA tests it read off that i was performing at about half the performace of that of another comparable ATA100 drive. My computer loads games slowly, and it reboots erratically, usually when i leave my computer idle. I installed the lastest hyperion 4-in-1s for my VIA chipset. Whats even weirder, i cant even DEFRAG my harddrive!!! It freezes up before it hits 2%. I used the build in defragger, but i even used another program called Diskeeper Lite to try and defrag, still freezes. Any help would REALLY REALLY be appreciated, thx.

Comments

  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited June 2003
    Has it always done this? What did you change that caused this? Please list all your hardware in all the PCI slots numbered from the agp slot down. Are all of your drivers up to date? What operating system are you using? We need a lot more info to be able to help you.

    Flint:cool:


    And WELCOME to Icrontic!!
  • SoooopahflySoooopahfly
    edited June 2003
    ooops hehe forgot all that other stuff...

    okay heres my complete setup:
    ABIT KT7-RAID
    1GHz TBird
    512MB Generic RAM @ CAS3 in 2 256 sticks
    GEneric CDROM on IDE1, HP CDWriter on IDE2
    Western Digital ATA100 80Gig 8meg Cache on IDE3 [RAID controller, although NO RAID setup]
    Older 30gig maxtor HD on IDE4 as a supplemental drive [No RAID]
    AGP Slot has GF2Pro @ stock speeds 200/400Mhz
    PCI 1 & 2 empty
    PCI 3 MUSE sound card
    PCI 4 ethernet card
    PCI 5 empty
    PCI 6/ISA shared slot empty
    running Windows XP Professional

    This actually happened on my old maxtor HD because i ran it alone before i bought my WD hard drive, so im guessing its a problem with the mobo. I do recall that i was able to fix the problem, i just have NO IDEA what i did to fix it, that was over a year or so ago when i was more of a regular here at Icrontic 8 P

    As i said i just DLed the latest hyperion 4-in-1s for my VIA chipset, and i used "quick setup" when i installed them. I THINK im running ACPI because when i view my device manager and look at the IRQs, it shows IRQ9 with Microsoft ACPI-compliant system. My video drivers are @ the dets 44.03.

    When i go into the Highpoint BIOS setup as well i have both the drives set to UDMA5.

    Hope this helps a bit more, Thx again 8 )
  • Cool-CanuckCool-Canuck
    edited June 2003
    Soooopahfly, check that WD drive an make sure the jumper is set for single disk. (not master)

    There are a couple of bios setting that maybe a problem, but check that disk first and I'll have a look around for my bios stuff.
  • SoooopahflySoooopahfly
    edited June 2003
    ATTO.jpg

    here are my ATTO results...8 ( i read in the "Hard disk benches" post, NightShade737 who is using the same hard drive as me gets about 50k tops.

    Also, im currently running on the cable select jumpers for my drive.

    I was thinking maybe i should update the drivers for my HPT...so i grabbed the driver files off of the ABIT site, they are 2.34
    http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/biosdriver.php?categories=1&model=91

    Although it says "Note: The revision of BIOS and driver should be coincident." Does that mean the ABIT mobo BIOS or is their a HPT BIOS. Should i DL the KT7-Raid A9 BIOs and flash with that to match the BIOS and driver revisions?
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited June 2003
    50k is uninhabited speed, you should be around 42k with data on the drive.

    The only time I have had a drive freeze when it reached a certain point was when it was physically damaged.

    Go to the run command and type:

    chkdsk C: /f /x /r

    and answer Yes if it asks you you want to shedule a check at startup, then restart.

    NS
  • stoopidstoopid Albany, NY New
    edited June 2003
    Originally posted by Soooopahfly
    Although it says "Note: The revision of BIOS and driver should be coincident." Does that mean the ABIT mobo BIOS or is their a HPT BIOS. Should i DL the KT7-Raid A9 BIOs and flash with that to match the BIOS and driver revisions?

    The mobo bios has no impact on the highpoint raid, they're referring to having the same hpt bios to match the drivers.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited June 2003
    But the newer MB bios he mentioned will have the newer Highpoint bios already installed.

    Ok I have one question. You can hit 50,000 on atto on the rim of the drive with atto but more like 30,000 at the very end of the drive. Acess is much faster on the rim. So are you by any chance testing a drive thats maybe 2/3 full? Just asking to save ya some trouble.

    Tex
  • SoooopahflySoooopahfly
    edited June 2003
    Okay so i think I'll give the A9 BIOS a try, and then I'll update the HPT drivers along with it.

    Im hitting 30000 with 8gigs of free space from the 80gig capacity, but it is also pretty fragged up. But as i said before i cant get the computer to defrag, because if freezes up. But can that really affect my harddrives benchmarks so much as to drop me 12000 points? And beside that, my real world performance is still pretty bad, so its not just the benchmark, but then i guess that can be because of the fragmentation.

    The drive is in there alone right now, i DCed my other drive, the jumper is set to Cable select.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited June 2003
    But thats about the right speed for the tail end of the drive.

    But the freezing up bothers me. When you defrag it uses your ram to sort stuff. Start by using docmemory or something to verify the rams good. Does it lock up right away? At the same place every time? Are doing a clean boot and letting it defrag from teh boot and not the loaded OS?

    Have you tried a differant tool? Have you done a scandisk and make sure under options you check both the boxs for "check data area" and the "test free space" thing to check both the data areas and open areas for bad sectors.

    Tex
  • SoooopahflySoooopahfly
    edited June 2003
    Locks up in same place every time. I have been defragging from a fresh boot, I close all my programs and most of my processes through the task manager.

    Whenever i run scandisk, i have to schedule it for reboot. So when i reboot it goes to that one light blue screen after the win XP logo goes up and it looks as if it will start scanning, but then it says, "Cannot open drive for direct access" then it says disk scanning complete and continues to boot up.
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