Speed problems with SATA drive

[davids]

Hi,

I am having a problem (again) with a SATA drive: It is on a friends machine and has been running as a data drive for a few months with no problems.

Recently I tryed to install it as the master drive and loaded the operating system onto it, it initially appeared very slow and after a few hours it began to react strangely in that it would sometimes fail to boot, and also icons in my computer were slow to appear etc.

Now, admitadly, I did hook the old hard drive (OS still in tact) back up as secondary, and I disabled it in the bios - so when the computer boots it should not read from its boot sector, but in XP the drive is still recognised despite it being disabled in the bios (this used to work fine on a setup I used to have running xp and 2000). So maybe that is causing problems, I dont know.

To test the drive further I have installed it on my computer and loaded a clean instal of XP (using windows XPs dual boot facility). So far it hasnt given me any major problems, however it is still very slow to boot at about 1minute 25 seconds (from power on to the user logon screen)- and this is with only the minimum drivers loaded, and a firewall. Now that seems pretty slow to me, considering my SATA drive does it in about 58 seconds.

The only other problem I can see is that on the SATA drive, I have to have the "limit to 150MB/s" jumper connected - otherwise I cant get it to run at all, although I have read the motherboard manual, and Hi-speed sata is supported.

So I am wondering if anyone knows firstly, is 150mb/s a particularly slow speed for a sata drive, and would that slow the OS load time? Or is it possible there is a problem with the drive itself. And also, if anyone has any info on the 150mb/s limiter I would be greatfull to hear that as well.


Thanks in advance for any help, and sorry this post is SO long!!

 

[IBN]

I am having a similar problem with my WD Raptor. It runs at 10,000 rpm and it seems to be running slow. On the same system i previously had a WD 250GB and to be honest i cant notice much of a differencre at all between the two drives!!!

I limited the WD 250G to 150mbps to see whether there might have been a conflict between the Raptor at 150mbps and the 250GB at 300mbps. But still not much of a difference!!!

Recently i went into the BIOS and enabled 32bit Data Transfer and yeah I do see an improvement, but slight it is!!!

Maybe try enabling 32bit Data transfer for the SATA drive in the BIOS and see what happens???

How about running some Benchmarking software for the Hard Drive or Diagnostic software?

But yeah people i have a similar problem with my Raptor and another SATA Drive running slow.

PS
SATA 150 or SATA 300 there isnt much difference at all. I did a similar question in another post and thats the advice i got. So i wouldnt sweat jumpering it to 150mbps. Also check out the motherboard manual and site and see whether your motherboard supports SATA 300 drives. Why not update the BIOS???

 

[davids]

Ibn

Thanks IBN, I will try enabling 32 bit data transfer.

My other sata drive (the one that runs well) is also a WD, its 40gig I think, but it does not have a 150mb/s limiter on it, so does that mean it only runs at 150mb/s n the first place?

I will try running some diagnostic tests as well.

 

[IBN]

If is doesnt have a SATA 150 on jumper it most probably is a 150. Thats my take on it.

Another thing, make sure in the BIOS the SATAs are configured as standard IDEs and not RAID.