WD Caviar SE16 500GB SATA2 at 1,5 MB/s transfer speed

[Bearthunder]

I used to have two IDE disks, cloned them to the new SATA drives (WD500AAKS-00YGA0), threw out the IDE disks and booted on the SATA disks. Worked like a charm. For a while. Now everthing is slow as slow can ever get. (That is, everything that has to do with reading/writing to and from the disks. Browsing goes fine, as does for example playing WoW, though the load times are extreme).

Here's the result of the SiSoftware Sandra Benchmark test

Drive Index : 1522 kB/s
Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.
Random Access Time : 13 ms
Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.

Performance Test Status
Run ID : PWKS1 on 17. desember 2007 at 19:35:14
Platform Compliance : Win32 x86
System Timer : 3.6MHz
Use Overlapped I/O : Yes
I/O Queue Depth : 4 request(s)
Block Size : 1MB

Volume Information
Capacity : 466GB

Detailed Benchmark Results
Speed at position 0% : 1508 kB/s (98%)
Speed at position 3% : 1529 kB/s (99%)
****snip****
Speed at position 97% : 1505 kB/s (98%)
Speed at position 100% : 1530 kB/s (99%)
Random Access Time : 13 ms
Full Stroke Access Time : 11 ms

Physical Disk
Model : WDC WD5000AAKS-00YGA0
Version : 12.01C02
Rotational Speed : 5400rpm (estimated)
Removable Drive : No
Queueing On : No

My mainboard is a MSI RS485-SB600 with ATI 48X ICP chipset and has 2 GB RAM installed on it. The CPU a AMD Athlon 3000+. BIOS : 07/28/2006-RS485-SB600-6A666PRQC-00. OS is Windows XP Pro SP2.

So, can anyone please tell me that I'm blind, and that there is an obvious explanation to this problem, preferably one that doesn't involve me buying a new motherboard or something like that?

I've also experienced som high pitched sounds from the WD disks, is this normal?

 

[Nodsu]

At first glance, I would blame Windows still using IDE drivers and some compatibility mode on the SATA controller being horribly slow or buggy, but you say that at first everything was running smoothly..

Maybe make sure that your drives and "IDE" (or SATA?) controllers are using DMA (in Device Manager)?

Have you installed the drivers for your SATA controller?

Testing the hard drives with the WD diagnostics utility can't hurt either..

 

[Tedster]

Are you using XP or Vista? Seems to me I remember reading recently M$ is coming out with a patch for Vista regarding this problem.

 

[Bearthunder]

All drivers are installed and up to date. As the SATA disks were added to an existing XP installation setting them to anything but "Native IDE" in the BIOS results in BSOD. DMA is active. WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics does not report any errors.

 

[Nodsu]

Set them to something other than "Native IDE" and fix your Windows by installing the proper SATA drivers.. (Maybe do a repair install and provide the driver floppy?)