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Drive on SATA Controller Causes PC Stuttering

J

John G.

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 28, 2005
Messages
163
I brought up this problem in another of my threads, but since it's a totally different issue than the title of the old thread implies, I'll see if I can get any more advice here.

I have a small, patchwork file server that was out of space and had all mainboard channels in use. So I decided to get a cheap SATA controller and attach a 400GB WD4000YR Raid Edition SATA drive to expand my storage options.

The computer had no trouble detecting it, initializing the hard drive, formatting the drive, and putting about 250GB of data onto it. Unfortunately, whenever I try to access the new drive, I get serious lag. Like, the computer freezes up for about two-three seconds every five seconds or so. Mouse stops moving, programs don't respond (in that two-three second window). Very very annoying. Seems that this affects all read/write operations of the drive too-- tranfer rates are terrible, video can't be streamed off of it. I can't recall if it was like this transferring the initial 250GB of data, but I suspect it was.

The system specs (if they might help) look like this:
Dell OptiPlex GX110, Made in 2001
1GHz PIII w/ 512MB PC100 SDRAM
HDDs: 1x80GB, 3x320GB, 1x400GB
NVidia MX4000 128MB Video Card (on PCI bus)
Standard Sound Card (on PCI bus)
SATA/IDE Combo Controller (on PCI bus)

In the other thread, there were two possible problems mentioned: that I might be saturating the PCI bus, or that there may be some DMA related problem with the drive/controller. As for the PCI bus suggestion, I tried streaming video off the drive over the LAN (integrated LAN would mean bypassing anything other than the controller on the PCI bus, right?) and it was still choppy, though not as unplayable as when trying to watch it off the computer directly. For the DMA related problem, I can't seem to find where to get to any settings for DMA on the drive within Windows, and as such don't know how to further diagnose the problem. It was suggested that I load a Linux distro off a CD to diagnose DMA stuff, but that's an additional hassle that I'll put off until absolutely necessary.

Anyone who hasn't been following the old thread have any advice for me?
 
Have you run chkdsk on the 400? Also try Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device manager->IDE/ATAPI controllers (may also be under scsi controllers)->{your device}->Advanced Settings. I haven't heard of this card, so I have no experience with it. But I wouldn't expect you to be overloading the pci bus if you've got the right drivers for your video card; anything from nvidia should be fine.

 
Are there drivers available from Via? Have you installed them?

Doesn't the optiplex 110 have an AGP port?
 
unhappy_mage said:
Have you run chkdsk on the 400? Also try Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device manager->IDE/ATAPI controllers (may also be under scsi controllers)->{your device}->Advanced Settings. I haven't heard of this card, so I have no experience with it. But I wouldn't expect you to be overloading the pci bus if you've got the right drivers for your video card; anything from nvidia should be fine.
Click to expand...

Under Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager->SCSI Properties (it refers to the drive in other locations as SCSI as well), there is no Advanced Settings button, just the following options, both unchecked:
Disable Tagged Queueing
Disable Synchronous Transfers

Check disk on the 400GB completed without any errors. Took about 10 minutes though.

I have installed the nVidia GFX card drivers, and installed the drivers for the controller card that were included on the install disk.
 
I just tried installing the Controller/RAID management program that came with the controller, but it didn't fix the problem, and the program itself seems relatively worthless in terms of diagnosing the problem. It did have a little line in the "Drive Information" section that said:

Current Access Mode: DMA

So... there's that. Argh.
 
BigBadBiologist said:
What OS are you using?

Are these drivers any newer than the ones you got with the card?
http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=1&CatID=1180&SubCatID=117
Click to expand...

My OS is Windows XP Pro. Those drivers are significantly newer than the ones that shipped with the card (thanks for find those!!), and updating the drivers has significantly improved the problem. Accessing the drive no longer forces the entire machine to lock up, though the drive itself still seems to be having some read/write issues.

As it was before, if someone were accessing the drive over the network, the computer would be unusable. Now, that is no longer the case. But if people are trying to stream media off the new drive (as is its primary purpose), there is still significant stuttering. Perhaps the drive is merely suffering from extremely poor transfer rates, but if nothing else, it appears to me that this is ultimately a driver issue and there's little I can do about it from here on out but grin and bear it, and hope for a fix in the next driver update.

I'll post some benchmarks of the drive's read/write performance soon, you guys can tell me if it's what I should expect from a PCI controller card.

Thanks again for the help, Biologist!!
 
is your SATA cable wrapped around anything or laying next to something with a lot of electronic noise? (I'm grasping at things here)
 
Benchmark results are as follows:

Code: 
		Read		Write
----------------------------------------
Buffered	3MB/sec		60MB/sec
Sequential	6MB/sec		62MB/sec
Random		5MB/sec		51MB/sec

Lookin' pretty strange to me. Any ideas?
 
Have you tried DriverCleaner followed by the latest 4in1s for your motherboard? Also, have you investigated a BIOS update?
 
I believe that mobo has an intel BX chipset, so the XP drivers should be fine. But a BIOS update is definitely a good idea.
 
Just an update on this problem: Tried the BIOS update, no change in performance. I ran another benchmark test, same results, though the gap between Buffered Read and the other types of Read widened a bit (with Buffered being slowest).

So, unless the drive itself is defective (which isn't likely), this is a problem with the controller card. The fact that the driver update helped the problem a lot seems to confirm that. But even the latest drivers don't make things perfect, so I suppose I'll just have to deal with it, sit and wait until they come out with another driver update.

Thanks for your help guys!
 
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