Getting very poor speeds in Windows XP

V

visionviper

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 24, 2007
Messages
1,222
I have a WD 80gb SATA hard drive on a VIA m-itx system. The computer has been suffering from poor performance and in an attempt to figure out the problem I used HD Tune to test the speed of the drive. I am getting very low read speeds (<3MBps). I have used various diagnostic tools to see if it was a hardware problem, but none of the applications have found anything wrong with the drive itself.

What can be causing this low performance?
 
If this is for your Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 It will be either the Intel INF updater, the Intel Application Accelerator, or the Intel Matrix Manager that you will want to reinstall/update, depending on your chipset and BIOS settings.
 
Both primary IDE channels are set to "DMA if available." One of the channels is currently in PIO Mode and the other says its in UDMA Mode 2. When I open HD Tune and look at the info for my hard drive it says its in UDMA Mode 6.

I only have 2 drives attached and they are the hard drive and a CD/DVD-ROM drive.
 
Have you replaced cables with known good cables?
Do you hear frequent retries or resets when the drives are running?
Do the drives have adequate cooling?
Were the drives performing well for a time and then started to run poorly? IF so, can you determine when/what may have occurred or changed?
 
The drive does run hotter than most, but not at unsafe temperatures as far as I can tell. I guess it is possible then that it might have run too hot at times, but I am yet to see that.

The drive was working just fine when the computer was first set up. It has only been recent (within the last month or so) that its had problems.

Windows is not suffering from frequent reboots. It works, just very slowly.

As far as changes to the system that could have caused problems - I have no clue. I know the computer has been moved around a couple of times, but all the hardware tests I run on it come back clean.

Does anyone know of a way I could check the drive's performance outside of windows? I would like to run something like HD Tune to see the kind of read speeds I get when I am not in the windows installation. I am almost certain its a software problem, and this would prove it.
 
Deleting the primary IDE channel the drive was on and rebooting worked like a charm. Thank you everyone for you help.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top