new WD SATA slows down in windows

E

emorphien

2[H]4U
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Nov 15, 2003
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I added a second 120 gig WD SATA drive to my computer and have noticed an interesting habit.

When I first boot up and run HD-Tach it gives a nearly 50mb/s transfer rate at start (if I remember correctly that's the measure) and the burst speed is over 80mb/s. However if I test it again later this does not occur, it has slowed down to 26mb/s or so (average). My main drive is of the same type and stays near 50 all the time (as does my friend's new Hitachi 120gig sata).

I've turned off indexing and other things on the drive thinking somethings bogging it down, although that's a huge difference to me, so I can't see those causing this.

I'm running XP pro on the 2.8ghz system in my sig, I tested the drive on SATA connectors 2 and 3. Using 2 puts it on the same controller as my main drive and 3 is on a separate controller. No difference.

I don't think it's heat because right after a reboot it's fast again for a while. I'm thinking it's defective but if I've missed something I'm open for suggestions.
 
I tested it using the software you suggested Ice Czar, and some scores were higher, some lower.

I also tested opening various 130mb tif files from both my c and d drives in to Photoshop CS and the c drive was generally faster by about a second.
 
Ok, I can understand that some, I've got some 60 gigs of data on the first drive and will be backing up a lot more to the second which is currently empty. It's been a number of years since I've been on a computer of my own with two internal hard drives, and I wasn't so performance minded back then.

I'm not sure that clarifies for me why it would be faster (according to HD Tach) when I've just entered windows.
 
hold it
these are two seperate physical HDDs?
Not 2 partitions (Drive C Drive D) on the same physical HDD?

the Zoned Bit Recording applies to the second instance

if its 2 seperate physical HDDs
describe the physical config, Primary Channel master slave, Secondary Channel Master Slave


http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd3/
"A common way to determine the effective internal performance of hard discs is to run sequential reads across the entire length of the platter, that is, from the fastest tracks at the OD to the slowest tracks at the ID. If this is done correctly, the benchmark will measure every LBA on the platter. This, however, does take quite a bit of time, depending on the capacity of the drive. To give an idea, measuring a 20 GB drive at 40 MB/sec average will take 500 sec, a 120 GB drive will take about 1 hour to run. Hence, many benchmarks use shortcuts, that is H2Dbench uses 1000 distinct spot check points in regular intervals across the lenght of the platter, HDTach divides the entire platter into blocks of 65532 kBytes size and runs a brief test sequence within each. The inner cylinders are slower than the outer ones and somebody came up with the clever idea of using the average across the entire length as a metric to define a given drive's media performance. Unfortunately, there are some serious problems with this approach"


"
 
Quick answer, yes it's 2 seperate drives and if I remember correctly C: is Primary master and D: is secondary master right now.

Physical drive 1 and physical drive 2 get about the same performance after I enter windows, but the new drive (D drive) slows down considerably with time.
 
you got me
try reversing the connections?
see if it will then benchmark out better.
so that would put the new HDD on port 1?
a pain to reconfigure
Im not overly familiar with the new SATA BIOS options
but would imagine it still scans the bus till it finds something to boot :p
 
Originally posted by Ice Czar
you got me
try reversing the connections?
Click to expand...

I haven't had a chance to try that one yet, but switching the cables at the back of the drives is easy. Hopefully it wouldn't have too much trouble booting; however I might get a boot.ini error doing that, which is fixable, just a pain and an extra step.

If it still does this after that I'll probably just RMA the sucker and hope for better luck.

Funny thing about when you were trying to help earlier, I was thinking this doesn't sound right for two seperate drives, but I was on campus and had intermittent access on my laptop and didn't get to think about it much.

thanks though, i'll let you know what happens I suppose :confused:
 
you shouldnt have any boot.ini issues
it would be boot order, the BIOS will scan the channels and ports for a bootsector, then the ntldr will bootstrap the drive and read the boot.ini, by then its already on the right drive, unless there is a bootable OS on the other HDD that is referenced in the boot.ini you wont have any issues ;)
 
Ah, thanks for telling me that. Guess the troubles I've heard about doing that aren't true. :)
 
if the boot order is changed to point to the new drive
the drive letters (and how the are enumerated) wont change
that might require HDD0 be changed to HDD1 in the boot order

both the BIOS and Windows employs the following scan order I believe

-- Primary Master primary partition
-- Primary Slave primary partition
-- Secondary Master primary partition
-- Secondary Slave primary partition
-- Primary Master extended partition with logical drives
-- Primary Slave extended partition with logical drives
-- Secondary Master extended partition with logical drives
-- Secondary Slave extended partition with logical drives

of course a bootable partition would have to be a primary partition and active
and you can have upto 4 primary partitions per HDD
(or 3 and an extended partition) that can be got around with a boot manager
but thats a different can of worms
 
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