Slooooow hard drive problem

R

Raxxath

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
491
After narrowing this down to a hard drive problem, I figured I should ask here, since I'm not getting many responses in General Hardware.

A few days ago, my computer(not the one in my sig) was feeling a bit laggy as I'd had it on all day, so I restarted it. There was no video when it came back on, so I reinserted the sound card and video card. That worked, but my computer was suddenly slow as molasses. I've managed to run a few HD Tach tests, which came up with very strange, different results each time. I saw it report everything from normal speeds, to an average read of 3.9 mb/s, burst of 5 mb/s, random access times of 290 ms, and CPU utilization of 60%. When I first boot up the rig, everything is about normal speed for maybe a minute, then goes to absolute crap.

I took the drive out and hooked it up to the rig you see in my sig, and... it works perfectly fine, with completely normal HD Tach readings. So hopefully that means the drive, a couple month old 750gb WD Green Power, isn't dying(SMART says everything is normal too).

As far as I know, I've made sure that everything is in UDMA mode in the device manager, but I might be missing something there. I've also uninstalled the SATA controller drivers in the device manager, and let it reinstall with no luck. I've tried changing SATA ports and cables, also with no luck. Can anyone help me out here?
 
Did you make any changes just before you noticed the problem? Do you have the problem in safe mode?
 
DEX1 said:
Did you make any changes just before you noticed the problem? Do you have the problem in safe mode?
Click to expand...

No changes. In safe mode things feel more responsive, but HD Tach is still giving me speeds like 4 mb/s. I'm not sure if that's normal for safe mode or not.
 
Check in Device Manager and makes sure the drive has not "slipped" onto PIO mode.

Good Luck!
 
I am assuming that you have an IDE drive. If in the Device Manager under the IDE/ATA/ATAPI contoller, unter the appropriate IDE Channel, it shows the Current Transfer Mode as Ultra DMA Mode 5, you are ok there. I haven't had it happen for a long time, but I remember when I had a drive that suddenly got ridiculously slow that was the reason. BTW, the drive wound up dieing.

Time to start looking elsewhere. I'd start by backing up everything you don't want to loose, just in case the drive is going.

Is the drive that is slow an OS drive or data? If it is the OS drive and it worked as a data drive in a different machine, maybe the something else in the backround is hogging the system? Virus? Check Task Manager and see if anything is hogging I/O reads or writes.

Good luck in your search!
 
Monk0101 said:
I am assuming that you have an IDE drive. If in the Device Manager under the IDE/ATA/ATAPI contoller, unter the appropriate IDE Channel, it shows the Current Transfer Mode as Ultra DMA Mode 5, you are ok there. I haven't had it happen for a long time, but I remember when I had a drive that suddenly got ridiculously slow that was the reason. BTW, the drive wound up dieing.

Time to start looking elsewhere. I'd start by backing up everything you don't want to loose, just in case the drive is going.

Is the drive that is slow an OS drive or data? If it is the OS drive and it worked as a data drive in a different machine, maybe the something else in the backround is hogging the system? Virus? Check Task Manager and see if anything is hogging I/O reads or writes.

Good luck in your search!
Click to expand...

Its actually a SATA drive, and there is no option for UDMA under the SATA controller in the device manager, as far as I can see.

The drive has the OS on it, and yes, it worked fine as a data disk in my other rig. I've already run AVG and Spybot scans that turned up nothing. Looking in the task manager, the processes that stand out are:

avgrsx.exe Reads: 56,000 Writes: 11,000
avgtray.exe Reads: 26,000 Writes: 500
csrss.exe Reads: 69,000 Writes: 0
avgwdsvc.exe Reads: 222,000 Writes: 48,000

I don't know what normal values would be for those, so you'll have to help me out there.

Edit: Seeing that most of the big numbers were related to AVG, I closed it, and now everything is back to full speed. HD Tach is normal too. I guess I should uninstall AVG, huh? What on earth would cause it to do that?

Edit 2: Never mind, that lasted only a couple minutes, its back to being slow as hell now.
 
Check the event log to see if any drive or controller errors are occurring.
 
That looks pretty reasonable. Three of the four are just you anti-virus doing it's thing.

You are pretty much shooting in the dark now. Could be Windows or a driver got borked or the sata controller is having problems or voodoo curse. The easiest to check its to reinstall the driver for the sata controller. If that doesn't help and you have a spare drive, pop it in the machine and load windows on it. If it works fine then Windows was the problem. If it doesn't then I would guess the sata controller.

Other than that, I am pretty much out of ideas.

Sorry!
 
Monk0101 said:
That looks pretty reasonable. Three of the four are just you anti-virus doing it's thing.

You are pretty much shooting in the dark now. Could be Windows or a driver got borked or the sata controller is having problems or voodoo curse. The easiest to check its to reinstall the driver for the sata controller. If that doesn't help and you have a spare drive, pop it in the machine and load windows on it. If it works fine then Windows was the problem. If it doesn't then I would guess the sata controller.

Other than that, I am pretty much out of ideas.

Sorry!
Click to expand...

I already tried reinstalling the SATA controller :(.

I think I'm just going to back up the rest of my data, and reformat the drive. However, I'm worried that if this is a virus, then it could go with my data onto my external hard drive.

Interestingly, this is on a Bad Axe 2, the same as you :p.
 
Nenu said:
Check your event log for errors.
Click to expand...

The system event log is filled with errors from the Disk that say it has a bad block. There are also errors from atapi.

I forgot to mention in this thread that this computer has two hard drives in it, separated by a switch, so only one is ever powered on at a time. The system on the other hard drive is perfectly fine.
 
:rolleyes: take out the switch. juryrigging 1.5gbps through a mechanical device is monumentally dumb.

The other drive may be fine, but there's no way to tell what the real issue is unless you remove most likely point of failure first, which is the switch.
 
mwarps said:
:rolleyes: take out the switch. juryrigging 1.5gbps through a mechanical device is monumentally dumb.

The other drive may be fine, but there's no way to tell what the real issue is unless you remove most likely point of failure first, which is the switch.
Click to expand...

Its a DPDT switch, it has nothing to do with the data, is just switches power between the two drives. Besides, I've already long since disconnected the drive from the switch, on the off chance that a wire came loose or something. Its plugged in normally, and is no better off.
 
Remove the switch as mentioned. Have you switched while the drives are active?

If your switch is removed and you are still getting this result, try a full reformat with a fresh install.
 
okay. if the switch is out, and you're getting atapi errors and a bad block error, you either have a bad drive or a bad cable. do you have another cable to test with?
 
Agreed, the drive is need of repair or replacement.
Run check for errors with scan for bad sectors option ticked.
If everything seems to be and and you want the data, you need a tool like Spinwrite or HDD Regenerator to recover the data and restore the drive to a functional state again.
 
Ockie said:
Remove the switch as mentioned. Have you switched while the drives are active?

If your switch is removed and you are still getting this result, try a full reformat with a fresh install.
Click to expand...

Like I said, I removed the drive from the switch the moment this problem started. No, I have never switched power between the drives while the computer was on.

mwarps said:
okay. if the switch is out, and you're getting atapi errors and a bad block error, you either have a bad drive or a bad cable. do you have another cable to test with?
Click to expand...

I already said I've tried different cables and different SATA ports with no luck.

Nenu said:
Agreed, the drive is need of repair or replacement.
Run check for errors with scan for bad sectors option ticked.
If everything seems to be and and you want the data, you need a tool like Spinwrite or HDD Regenerator to recover the data and restore the drive to a functional state again.
Click to expand...

What program should I use to check for bad sectors?
 
Windows Scandisk and if it finds a lot wrong, then run Spinwrite or HDD Regenerator as mentioned above.
 
I (kinda) found what's causing the problem... its the internet. As soon as I unplug the ethernet cord, it works perfectly. Plug it back in, terrible performance. I've run all kinds of virus scans but they don't pick anything up. Does anyone have an idea as to what this might be, or how I could pinpoint it?
 
Raxxath said:
I (kinda) found what's causing the problem... its the internet. As soon as I unplug the ethernet cord, it works perfectly. Plug it back in, terrible performance. I've run all kinds of virus scans but they don't pick anything up. Does anyone have an idea as to what this might be, or how I could pinpoint it?
Click to expand...

IRQ conflict possibly.
If the ethernet controller and hard drive controller are on the same interrupt, they can interfere with each others operation.
 
Nenu said:
IRQ conflict possibly.
If the ethernet controller and hard drive controller are on the same interrupt, they can interfere with each others operation.
Click to expand...


I recently had a problem with my HP prebuilt running slower than crap after I switched my video card back to my 7600GT. After some fooling around I figured out it was the wireless card in my pc acting up with the new card and creating massive amounts of conflict in my system. What I did was just reinstall the drivers for my card, and now everything works great. I would fool around with your Ethernet set up and see if you can figure it out.

A good tool for figuring out whether its a hardware conflict is process explorer,

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

It is basically a more in depth task manager and you will be able to see if there are any hardware interrupts or something like that.
 
Black-Tom said:
I recently had a problem with my HP prebuilt running slower than crap after I switched my video card back to my 7600GT. After some fooling around I figured out it was the wireless card in my pc acting up with the new card and creating massive amounts of conflict in my system. What I did was just reinstall the drivers for my card, and now everything works great. I would fool around with your Ethernet set up and see if you can figure it out.

A good tool for figuring out whether its a hardware conflict is process explorer,

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

It is basically a more in depth task manager and you will be able to see if there are any hardware interrupts or something like that.
Click to expand...

I tried the process explorer, but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. The interrupt column just said N/A or something like that as I recall.

I also reinstalled the network connections driver, but nothing has changed. I don't know what else to try.
 
If you have a PCI network card, plug it into a different PCI slot.
 
Nenu said:
If you have a PCI network card, plug it into a different PCI slot.
Click to expand...

Nope, not using a network card.

The drive gets errors in Western Digital's LifeGuard diagnostic tool under quick test mode, even when not connected to the internet. I've been running the extended test for hours, but it won't be done for another hour or so. If it does turn out that the hard drive is slowly failing or something, will WD replace it?
 
Report it to WD, they will get you to run the diagnosis tool and decide if they should replace it.
It does sound faulty.
 
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