Please help me to diagnose this problem

[dimbo]

I posted yesterday on the Motherboard forum because I suspected I might be having a problem with the chipset on my P5NE-SLI but now I'm thinking it might be the HDD that's playing up.

I'm experiencing intermittent slow file transfer between two partitions on my SATA II drive. Speeds are typically down as low as 500kb/second (YES KB!). Programmes seem to be a bit slower than usual starting and boot times are longer. During boot-up the bios also seems to be taking slightly longer than normal to detect the drives.

I've scanned the HDD for errors and bad sectors and run several benchmarks with HDTune (see below) HDTune results seems to vary a lot every time I run it. I've swapped the PSU and SATA cable etc.The bios is up to date, all the Nvidia motherboard drivers are up to date and I've checked for Viruses with Kaspersky 2010. All the hardware in device manager looks okay with no question marks against anything. Other than the seriously low file transfer speeds the system is stable with no lock-ups or crashes. It starts and shuts down fine.

I've read that the Nvidia 650i chipset isn't much good but this system used to be really quick so I'm suspecting a hardware failure might be around the corner

Any ideas what the problem might be?
Thanks, Steve.

System info:
Windows 7 (64bit) fresh install
Asus P5N-e SLI
E7200 CPU (not overclocked but has been in the past)
Samsung HD753LJ HDD
4GB OCZ ram
Radeon 3800
Quality 600w Power Supply

 

[defaultluser]

Have you run a tool to check SMART?

You can use this tool:

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

Or you can get SMART data out of Speedfan:

http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php

I've never used Disk Checkup, but I can tell you how to use Speedfan:

Run Speedfan, once it is done loading click the SMART tab. Select your hard disk from the drop-down list at the top of the tab, and then click "Perform an in-depth online analysis of this drive."

You'll want to post a screenshot of that analysis page.

 

[dimbo]

Hi,

I've just installed both of these but neither of them seem to be working

DiskCheckup says 'there were errors trying to gather the SMART info' and Speedfan doesn't list the drive in the drop-down box

 

[sabregen]

you have to have SMART enabled in BIOS on the controller port in order for those tools to work. I'd say check your physical connections, and see if you can enable SMART in BIOS. put the drive on another port and see if there's an issue with the port. you can also try another drive on the same port on the motherboard.

if you see the same crappy performance on the drive, on another motherboard port, it's likely the drive.
if you see the same performance on a different drive, on the same port, then it's likely the port.

 

[dimbo]

Thanks, I just checked and SMART is already enabled in the BIOS

 

[defaultluser]

Thanks, I just checked and SMART is already enabled in the BIOS

Sorry, I forgot this is Windows 7 (I just switched from XP myself). You will have to run Speedfan as Admin, or it won't be able to find your drives. Apparently SMART doesn't work in user mode

Right-click the shortcut and select Run as Admin. Then perform the above as I've described.