Strange Hard-Drive Slow Downs! HELP!

M

Matrox462

Gawd
Joined
Feb 25, 2004
Messages
926
I really hope someone can help me out with this... I've spent a lot of time thinking of different causes to this problem, and got nothing... so hopefully someone else might be able to help me. Here's my problem...

A while back I had a problem where when I minimized a window, the hard drive would be accessed for a quick second, then stop, then accessed again, then stop, and so on... Pretty close to a second interval. It'd do it for about 10 seconds or so after I minimzed the window. But when it does that, the computer would freeze just a very tiny bit. So if I was watching a movie, it'd get a little choppy. Even if I just move the mouse, it'd actually freeze for a split second. The actual freezing is very minor, but also *very* annoying. And it wasn't just with minimizing a window. I remember it doing it in games too, but only when just launching the game, for like the first minute into it.

Well, anyways, I did a format and reinstall of windows at the time, and everything worked great! Well... it's been months later... and suddenly it just showed up again out of no where! I would love to fix this without having to reformat. Especially since this a reoccuring problem, I don't want to have to reformat everytime it comes around. And sadly, I *would* have to, cause it's very noticable to me.

My system specs are:
Windows XP Home SP1
Pentium 4 2.26Ghz
512MB RAM
Dual 80GB Hard drives
NVidia GeForce4 MX420

Besides the problems I mentioned, I noticed the system seems to bog down much easier when the hard drive is being accessed. Like when I play an mp3, normally it'd NEVER chop up, or stutter in play. But now, if I go to run a program, it takes longer to run it, and the mp3 will stutter and stop for a second or two. Also, windows seems to take quite a bit longer to load now... :(

I have done scans with AVG and the latest virus defs, BOTH SpyBot and Ad-Aware, both using updated reference files. I have done a full surface ScanDisk, and done multiple defragmentation runs on the drive. I even tried playing around with the paging file and it's settings, thinking maybe the extra HD access is something with the paging file. And I see nothing out of the ordindary on my processes list... I just don't know what else to try.

It's funny too, cause I didn't do anything to cause it. Like new software, or new hardware... it just happened.

Thanks for reading this, and please feel free to express your thoughts on this! I'll take any advice at this point! Thanks very much
 
well i notice that after my pc has been on awhile and i have quite a bit of suff open (using around 300 mb of ram) that when i minimize something my mouse doesnt follow my movement for like .005 ms (hehe) but up untill this very min i havnt noticed that before, when i reboot it works fine again, also ran adaware/spybot. But i checked and my hard drive does not access when this happens. I it could be some windows feature or something im not sure, this pc is pretty clean too, no adaware/viruses, very selective on what i install. Im also on 56k so i dont install much. I would reboot your pc if you havnt already. I dont have any of the other issuses you are experiencing though. And believe me this slight mouse hang is so unnoticeable i have been using this pc for over a year and never seen it before.

Note i also checked this on my brothers pc, and the same thing happens to it when it has alot of open windows. His pc is a brand new install of windows, i believe it was installed in january. Both of us have Nvidia cards, perhaps it has something to do with Nview?
 
Hey, Flak Pyro, thanks for the responce. I'm very happy to say that I FIXED it! :D It had to completely do with the hard drive itself, and it's configuration... I spent a LOT of time going through all my processes that were running, and all my startup programs, and downloaded even more spyware and adware programs to try and rid the problem. But what I finally did was download a program called HD Tune (Which I really recommend for benchmark purposes) and look at the results I got...

HD Tune: WDC WD800AB-22CBA1 test results

Capacity : 74.5 GB (~80.0 GB)
Buffer size : 2048 KB
SMART : Yes
Standard : ATA/ATAPI-5
Supported mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)
Current mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)

Transfer Rate Minimum : 0.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 2.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 2.8 MB/sec
Access Time : 14.2 ms
Burst Rate : 3.1 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 91.9%

HD Tune: MAXTOR 6L080J4 test results

Capacity : 74.6 GB (~80.1 GB)
Buffer size : 1863168 bytes
SMART : Yes
Standard : ATA/ATAPI-5
Supported mode : UDMA Mode 6 (Ultra ATA/133)
Current mode : UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)

Transfer Rate Minimum : 21.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 40.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 34.1 MB/sec
Access Time : 12.2 ms
Burst Rate : 63.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 6.5%

The first drive is the one that was causing problems... 2.9MB/sec max?!?! My secondary drive has 40.2MB/sec max!! And look at the CPU usage! It was practically maxed out just to read the drive!

Well, after some research, I found out that even though it said it was using DMA mode, it was resorting to PIO mode... This drive is kind of flakey, and I read that if it has constant errors, window's will automatically revert it to the slower PIO even if "Use DMA If Available" is selected in the options of the IDE Controller properties. So anyways, to restore DMA mode you uninstall the drivers to your primary IDE controller, and let it reboot and reload them. And MAN what a difference in speed now. Not to mention that I freed up a LOT of ram and a LOT of load time from clearing out a lot of useless stuff I found while trying to hunt down the problem.. so now it's REALLY fast. (just the way I like it :D)

I'm posting all this cause hopefully it'll help someone out who is having problems with a slow drive... it was so slow it made a lot of things slow and choppy!

I just hope that windows doesn revert it to PIO mode again :( cause this drive is kinda messed up I think... sometimes during boot up in the POST testing, it warns me that my S.M.A.R.T. data is showing the drive is going to fail... but it works perfectly.. Hey, as long as i keep backups :p

Hope all this helps out someone!
 
Good to see you got it fixed. I have a maxtor 40 GB drive, its working alright right now and after reading your post i checked and i am still running in "DMA mode 5" under "Current mode" which is good news. I think the minimizing thing is either a XP feature or a Nview thing, or the fact that im using 305 MB out of 512 and have alot of different apps open. Anyway its barly noticeable. Seems to do it on some other XP machines i tested today too, and some werent set up by me so its not something im doing hehe.

Well glad to see you got it fixed, ill probably get a Western Digital drive during my next upgrade. This 40 is getting small.
 
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