My hard drives are running slowly!
I've got a Dell 2100 with a 1.1 Celeron and 384 MB SDRAM. The computer came with a 20 GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive, and a couple months ago I added another 80 GB drive of the same brand and type.
All worked well. The new 80 GB was the E: drive, and if I wanted something from the E: drive, it'd generally take 3-5 seconds extra to get it. A minor delay, but I could live with it.
Recently, I was rebuilding a computer for someone else. This is the one where I got it all tuned up, and the first day he had it at home, he unplugged the only memory stick with the computer turned on!
So I had to rebuild it again. We changed the MB, and the new MB came with a 450 P2 Slot 1. I added more memory, but the hard drive was also screwed up when he pulled the memory out. I had to reload XP to get it to work, and it took several tries.
During one of the tries, I disconnected the 2 hard drives in my Dell 2100, and used that other hard drive as my C: drive to try reloading XP while it was in my system.
I eventually got it working after about 4 reload attempts, and now it's okay.
But MY computer has problems now! It gets delays when accessing things on the C: drive, and the E: drive delays can be as much as 30 seconds! I'll have to click on something and just wait until the drives feel like doing something.
Why is this? My hard drives were disconnected when I put that other one in, so I don't see how any software could be screwed up. Is it possible that something in the BIOS or CMOS or somewhere on the MB got messed up in the process while that other hard drive was in my computer?
How to fix this? System Restore, maybe? Haven't tried that yet.
All worked well. The new 80 GB was the E: drive, and if I wanted something from the E: drive, it'd generally take 3-5 seconds extra to get it. A minor delay, but I could live with it.
Recently, I was rebuilding a computer for someone else. This is the one where I got it all tuned up, and the first day he had it at home, he unplugged the only memory stick with the computer turned on!
So I had to rebuild it again. We changed the MB, and the new MB came with a 450 P2 Slot 1. I added more memory, but the hard drive was also screwed up when he pulled the memory out. I had to reload XP to get it to work, and it took several tries.
During one of the tries, I disconnected the 2 hard drives in my Dell 2100, and used that other hard drive as my C: drive to try reloading XP while it was in my system.
I eventually got it working after about 4 reload attempts, and now it's okay.
But MY computer has problems now! It gets delays when accessing things on the C: drive, and the E: drive delays can be as much as 30 seconds! I'll have to click on something and just wait until the drives feel like doing something.
Why is this? My hard drives were disconnected when I put that other one in, so I don't see how any software could be screwed up. Is it possible that something in the BIOS or CMOS or somewhere on the MB got messed up in the process while that other hard drive was in my computer?
How to fix this? System Restore, maybe? Haven't tried that yet.
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Comments
If you have a HDD on the 2nd IDE channel then also check the transfer mode on that (Secondary IDE Channel).
I've never really had the problem so I don't know if that'll help...
John.
Device 1 is set to DMA if available, and is in PIO mode.
On the Secondary IDE channel (CD-RW / DVD drive), it's set to DMA if available, and is currently running in Ultra DMA Mode 2.
What is all this DMA / PIO mode stuff?
I'll go and see what's in the BIOS next.
I checked the defrag status on both drives. The C: Drive has some gaps but it says it doesn't need defragmented. It's 86% full.
The E: drive is about as defragged as it's possible to get. 2 big blue blocks with a single red line. 25% full.
PIO is non-DMA, slower than DMA 1. PIO 0 is slowest, PIO 4 is fastest until you get PIO 4+UDMA access, then it gets FASTER. PIO4 can be equivalent to UDMA 1 in Windows XP.
UDMA 1 is 8 MHz
UDMA 2 is 16.6 MHz
UDMA 3 is 33 MHz
UDMA 4 is 66 MHz
UDMA 5 is 100 MHz
UDMA 6 is 133 MHz,
UDMA and DMA both conform to this spec.
Look in your Dell BIOS, at the HD defs. Most Dells have BIOSs where the Hds are on Standard or Storage pages.
IS ANYTHING hooked to same cable as your Drive C drive??? If not, see if you managed to substitute an older 40 conductor cable for a ccable that has 80 conductors, ok??? Most Hds will drop to PIO or UDMA 3 (WDs will do this)if hooked to the cable with "bigger ribs" in it (40 conductor) and greatly favor the one with "smaller ribs"(80 conductor, but 40 connector points), so these things sometimes get switched and result is a performance mess-- but the "bigger ribbed" one will work fine for your DVD and\or CD-RW drives. So, if HD has a "big ribbed" cable, get it a "smaller ribbed" cable, or switch cables back the way they should be.
John.
I think you mean MB Ageek, not MHz.
Though not even PIO mode 4 or Fragmentation would cause 60 second pauses. Are the drives actually reading or writing during this pause, or are they idle?
Both hard drives are on the same IDE cable that came with this computer originally. The C drive is at the end of the cable, and the E drive is in the connector part way down the cable. They worked fine like this until I put that other hard drive in to try and get XP back on it.
Now I get delays.
DRIVES ARE IN WRONG ACCESS MODES, or you have one drive slightly fubarred or a connector just barely loose on one of the IDE cable HD connectrs, or BIOS was set manaully for the HD (smaller and possibly older enough to matter)you stuck in and left that way somehow. IDE controllers can set both drives to slower mode if one drive's settings are wrong for drive....
John-- who knows you check obvious first, then drill into what is left, however improbable overall as what is left wrong is root cause of problem often.
In the BIOS, it says the IDE drives are already in AUTO mode, with LBA disabled. It wouldn't let me scroll down to the DMA setting, which was disabled.
Power management settings are to turn off the hard disks after 10 minutes.
I removed my floppy drive from my newer computer, and used it on an older bsd machine that needed it badly. I installed win2ksp4 on my new raptor raid array expecting faster disk access speeds. WRONG. Windows would take forever to boot up (this was on a minimal install, mind you,) and I suffered from delayed disk access (probably 15 seconds or so, not quite the 30 seconds you mentioned.) This was not a hard-drive specific delay; it affected all of my other drives/partitions as well.
After tweaking my system (cacheman,perfectdisk,bootvis,xteqpro,) I came to the conclusion that I had used a corrupt windows installation cd. I rebooted, went into bios to configure my cd-rom as the first boot device. I realised that my floppy drive was still set as 'enabled' on the general systems page, and that 'floppy' was also enabled on my pci config page.
Turned them both off, and I have never looked back since. Raptor's a'blazin.