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Dying Drive?

A

Actuary

2[H]4U
Joined
Feb 8, 2005
Messages
2,468
Recently, I noticed it was taking an extremely long time to transfer files from one of my hard drives to the others. The drive in question is a 400GB Seagate SATA drive.

I ran speed tests using HD Tach and HDtune, and the readings are only about 11mb/sec, as opposed to my other drives which operate at 40ish. Is this an indication that the drive is going? Will they honor the warranty and allow me to RMA because it's running so slow?

I ran disk defrag, the drive isn't fragmented. I'm going to reformat it before I RMA, but to do so I need to transfer 300 GB of data to an external, which at 11mb/sec, takes an extremely long time.
 
You can't RMA a working drive AFAIK. You need to confirm that something is wrong with it. Use the manufacturer's diagnostics.
 
ryan_975 said:
Not sure if SATA drives can run in PIO mode, but check to see if it is.
Click to expand...
They can.

Good point, check that.

Check the Event Viewer for disk errors. Windows will drop a disk down into PIO mode if it detects a bunch of errors or bad blocks on a disk.
 
joeshmo1985 said:
How would I do that?
Click to expand...
Right click My Computer.

Hit Properties.

Go to Hardware, Device Manager.

Look for IDE/ATAPI controllers. Expand it and select the SATA controller.

Then go to the channel your drive is on, probably Primary channel.

Look at what the Transfer Mode is. You can do a speed thest there as well.
 
Thanks for the replies guys. The drive was indeed on PIO mode.

Now, since I'm curious, relieved, and frustrated all at the same time, what is PIO mode and how did the drive get changed over to that? The drive was definitely not running this slow earlier.
 
joeshmo1985 said:
Thanks for the replies guys. The drive was indeed on PIO mode.

Now, since I'm curious, relieved, and frustrated all at the same time, what is PIO mode and how did the drive get changed over to that? The drive was definitely not running this slow earlier.
Click to expand...
PIO mode is, obviously, very slow transfer mode.

Check your Event Viewer (control panel -> administrative tools -> event viewer) for disk errors.

And run your manufacturer's diagnostics. Your drive may indeed die at any moment. Or it may be fine.
 
joeshmo1985 said:
Thanks for the replies guys. The drive was indeed on PIO mode.

Now, since I'm curious, relieved, and frustrated all at the same time, what is PIO mode and how did the drive get changed over to that? The drive was definitely not running this slow earlier.
Click to expand...

PIO mode is Porgrammed I/O. It was how IDE drives communicated with the system back in the day. It's requires the CPU to handle every transaction the hard drive makes and has max transfer rate of 16MB/s (PIO mode 4). Sometimes when booting the hard drive will take too long to respond and XP will think it's a defective drive. Instead of giving up it'll knock it out of DMA mode and try again. If it gets a response that time it'll permanently set the hard drive in PIO mode until you fix it. It could be a sign of a failing drive, or just a system hiccup.
 
ryan_975 said:
PIO mode is Porgrammed I/O. It was how IDE drives communicated with the system back in the day. It's requires the CPU to handle every transaction the hard drive makes and has max transfer rate of 16MB/s (PIO mode 4). Sometimes when booting the hard drive will take too long to respond and XP will think it's a defective drive. Instead of giving up it'll knock it out of DMA mode and try again. If it gets a response that time it'll permanently set the hard drive in PIO mode until you fix it. It could be a sign of a failing drive, or just a system hiccup.
Click to expand...

I'm having a similar problem. I went to the events viewers in Administrative tools and it says

DCOM -- Error
Service Control -- Error
Disk - Warning

What is the next step? The system recognizes the drive when I hook it up by itself and it does load windows, but very slowly. However when I try to access the drive with my second hard drive [which is actually my primary] it loads slowly but won't read the disk, and gives me errors.

How would I attempt to fix this?
 
METALLlC BLUE said:
I'm having a similar problem. I went to the events viewers in Administrative tools and it says

DCOM -- Error
Service Control -- Error
Disk - Warning

What is the next step? The system recognizes the drive when I hook it up by itself and it does load windows, but very slowly. However when I try to access the drive with my second hard drive [which is actually my primary] it loads slowly but won't read the disk, and gives me errors.

How would I attempt to fix this?
Click to expand...

You need to download the diagnostic tools for that drive from the manufacturer's website. It'll be either a floppy or cd image that's bootable. Get it to the appropriate media and boot from it. Then tell it to scan the drive. It will most likely take at least an hour to do the scan.
 
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