Slow hardrive

[williedee]

a few days ago i finished building my first pc. everything went well, and after installing vista home premium 32 bit i noticed that my hardrive was always on. it is an old pata drive from my last pc, which i formatted to install vista on. it's copy speed on DiskBench is about 4.5 mb/s when copying a 288 mb file. that seems really slow, slower than with xp. i am not sure if i have the harddrive plugged into the correct channel, as i have 2 ide channels. motherboard is foxconn 975x7ab. thanks. and would a sata drive work any faster?

 

[kimsland]

It's the white one near the 24Pin power plug
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/produ...nboard/200605300302270921_975X7AB-8EKRS2H.jpg
Yes Sata is faster

 

[williedee]

ok thanks, i have the hdd's plugged into the wrong one then... oops.. that should speed things up a bit right? another question. if a hardrive is unreformatable, is there any way to use it again? thanks

 

[kimsland]

Here is Delpart http://www.juliatexas.com/delpart/Delpart.exe
I've used it many times for stubborn partitions removal

Here's some info on it: http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/DELpart.htm

 

[tipstir]

Yes SATA is faster but if you have PATA that's 133, on Vista things seem slower than on XP. That's why alot of us don't switch over. I just did on Vista Ultimate on a laptop I thought would handle Vista. It was slower than XP to load. No sound drivers for vista so makes nonsense to keep on that laptop. Then it was HP and kept saying DELL.

 

[Rick]

ok thanks, i have the hdd's plugged into the wrong one then... oops.. that should speed things up a bit right? another question. if a hardrive is unreformatable, is there any way to use it again? thanks

No, not technically. You have a different issue if you are getting 4mb/sec. Even the slowest ATA channel on your board is still 100MB/sec, so if everything is working properly, you should be getting the full speed out of your drive which will likely be greater than 40mb/sec sustained.

Your issue is likely to do with vanilla or out of date storage platform/chipset drivers or your drive is set to PIO mode (It should be using DMA).

 

[tipstir]

No, not technically. You have a different issue if you are getting 4mb/sec. Even the slowest ATA channel on your board is still 100MB/sec, so if everything is working properly, you should be getting the full speed out of your drive which will likely be greater than 40mb/sec sustained.

Your issue is likely to do with vanilla or out of date storage platform/chipset drivers or your drive is set to PIO mode (It should be using DMA).

Their was a notice that some IDE HDDs couldn't work in DMA and had to be put into PIO on some systems. But PIO is slower as you know already.

 

[williedee]

it turns out that i was using a bad cable. switched it to a new one, and it load everything up in about a minute and 40 seconds.. 10X faster than xp on my old pc. thanks for the links