Help: Hard drive lag

Bosing

Bosing

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Hello.

As the title says, I'm pretty sure I'm experiencing hard drive lag. When I load up a program, or a file off this particular drive things slow down, a lot. I've had the drive just over one year and six months, so hopefully this rules it out being faulty. It's one of three internal drives I currently have installed. Below are some fixes which I've tried but haven't had any luck with. These have been very challenging for me, as I'm quite the illiterate technophobe.

- reinstalled & updated chipset drivers
- updated BIOS
- reinstalled & updated IDE drivers
- reinstalled & updated graphics card drivers
- physically removed RAM from machine, placed back in
- checked all internal connections
- checked, unchecked DMA & PIO settings through Device Manager
- checked suitable power options via Control Panel ('never' on hard drives going asleep)
- Thought it might be a power issue. Unplugged the machine adapter from 4-way extension cable, to its own direct socket thinking it might get more juice. Have experienced 'disk write error' before because of a related power incident...

I've been trying to work through these alternatives before hashing out on a format (assuming that would even solve the problem?), as backing up off this disk before deletion will be a real pain. Below is my current specification:

-------------------------------------------------------------

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4800+ 2.50 Ghz


3.25 GB of RAM


Microsoft Windows XP Professional, SP 2


NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT


ASUSTeK Computer INC. M2A-VM HDMI 1.XX Bus Clock: 200 megahertz


Hitachi 160 GB


ST320410A 20.40 GB


ST3500418AS 500.11 GB <--- This drive

--------------------------------------------


Finally, would some sort of log be useful?

Thanks for your help.
 
Silverhazesurfer said:
run the diagnostic. Usually the manufacturer tools are the best way to go as they will tell you whether or not the drive is good or bad in fairly plain terms.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I gave that a run earlier. Unfortunately (and fortunately) there was nothing erroneous found. This perhaps points to a different problem.

This is the part where speculation from my symptoms is rethought, but more importantly, interest is lost.

Main symptom: it's as if my computers resources are being hogged elsewhere.
 
Not saying that SP3 will solve your 'problem' but bear it in mind when you reformat.

Is this the main drive, if not, why not, what happens if this drive is isolated ... try a different SATA cable and or change socket ...

I notice you have 3 HDs, one a 20.4GB (5400rpm) drive? is this sharing the IDE cable with anything? What happens if it is isolated? It would make a good doorstop. :)

Linux? yes, has some uses, usually useless to the layman home user as a diagnostic tool, IMO. :rolleyes:


:user:
 
muckshifter said:
Linux? yes, has some uses, usually useless to the layman home user as a diagnostic tool, IMO. :rolleyes:


:user:
Click to expand...

Running a live GNU/Linux distro for ten or fifteen minutes would in the case outlined tell you if the os or hardware was at fault.
I could be wrong but I do not think I am :cool:
 
muckshifter said:
... try a different SATA cable and or change socket ...
Click to expand...

Took on Muck's advice and isolated each drive, which confirmed the problem was that particular drive. Anyway, after some nervous poking around in there, I simply plugged the SATA cable connected to the iffy drive, into a different socket, and like magic, my system is back to normal. There you have it.

Thanks again for all of your help and suggestions.
 
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