On the first of this month I benchmarked my system running on Win XP using FreshDiagnose. The Hard Disk Benchmark showed 32 MB/s Write Speed & 40 MB/s Read Speed for my first Hard Drive & 35 MB/s by 51 MB/s for the second. Since yesterday all the operations on the first HDD (360 GB) have become extremely slow. A ~700 MB file copy operation on the same drive which used to take less than a minute, now requires 7-10 minutes. I tried re-fitting the SATA & power cables for the drives but that didn't help. The other drive (80 GB) is working fine. A dying drive is out of the question as the drive is no more than a month old. Also, the benchmark & performance under Vista are normal.

The benchmark results for the drive are: 3 MB/s Write Speed & 125 MB/s Read Speed. I did some testing on the 80 GB drive by first disabling 'Write Behind Caching' on the disk. The benchmark results for this drive were now similar: 5 MB/2 Write Speed & 140 MB/s Read Speed. On turning the 'Write Behind Caching' for this drive the speed was back to normal. It seemed obvious that this setting had got turned off for the 360 GB HDD. But, it was not. I tried disabling and re-enabling it followed by countless restarts. But nothing has helped.

This problem surfaced for the first time a few weeks ago. On that occasion, I was somehow able to get things back to normal. This time, however, none of these (including Scandisk & Defragment) are working.

Is your system low in ram? If so, having a near full hard drive could cause some issues of that nature. It's odd the benchmarks would show numbers like that but if you have little ram and low free HD the lack of swap space for moving files could heavily impede transfers and the like.

That seems really odd though, if the numbers are accurate I have a hard time picturing a scenario that could cause that. Seems almost like the cache or cables are bottlenecking one transfer direction to max out the other or something. Maybe others have better ideas :|

Could this be the problem?

In the old days, manufactures used to brag about CD writing speed. I think Pioneer once promoted that their CD writer can write up to 72X. But someone took that lie and found that only data written closer to center were writing in 72X but as it went closer to the edge the writing speed slowed down extremely. The average writing for a single CD broke down to a mere 12X.

I wonder if a similar phenomenon is happening here. When you initially install a fresh OS with minimum programs are installed I'm sure seeking and testing times were quite fast. But as you accumulate files and programs the actuator of a hard drive is now traveling the "longer" diameter. Therefore, causing slower seeking and transferring time...? I once saw the best explanation for this physics problem in Calvin and Hobbs. It had to do with a needle of a record player traveling shorter distance closer to the center ring and the outer ring must travel faster and longer distance to keep-up with the same speed.

Buffalo, I'm sure that could play into it somewhat but you need to note the great disparity between read/write speeds. 3mbs write is ridiculously slow but 125mbs read is insanely fast.

Another issue that slows drives is simply that they wear out over time, making a slower read/write speed as the actual platters spin slower. This normally is something I'd have suggested but the time between the first and second benchmark dates is way too small for that to play a factor.

turbopowerdmaxsteel, there 2 possibility of your problem. I'm assuming you're at least running WinXP or Win2k.

1. DMA/PIO mode related. Windows will downgrade your device DMA mode when CRC error occur along the interface. After UDMA-1, it will downgrade to PIO mode. This might be why your transfer speed is slow. PIO mode is VERY slow. You can check at the Device Manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Depending on which channel your harddisk is plugged into. Say "Primary IDE Channel". When you open up the property window, look under Advanced Settings. The "Current Transfer Mode" should be "Ultra DMA". If it's PIO Mode, then you might be having this problem. There's a few way to go around this. You can set the Transfer Mode to PIO, restart, the set back to DMA. Or you can refer to these 2 articles for more solutions.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/
http://winhlp.com/node/10

2. Your hard disk had a bad sector in the critical section like the file record or MFT (Master File Table). Thus it takes longer to read or write to your disk. Try do a bad sector scan on your hard disk by running checkdisk, make sure you tick "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors"

Good Luck

The RAM utilization is pretty mediocre. Also the drive being new is relatively empty.



I don't think that would be a problem because the 80 GB disk from the same manufacturer (Seagate) performed just fine even when it was brim full. Also, the drives have very low fragmentation and are quite low in terms of disk space usage.



A Hardware issue can be ruled out because the drive is performing quite well on the other OS - Vista.



You've hit the bullzeye, faulty.lee. XP disabled the UDMA mode for that drive. My PC remains on for 22 - 24 hours a day and during the non-running phase it is mostly hibernating. Perhaps the constant hibernate and resume operations are causing this. But, then again, I have been continuously doing this for the last two years and my old drive didn't have this problem. XP reported one of the drives as using UDMA Mode 5 while the other one was using PIO. Chaging it back to 'UDMA if available' didn't work so I followed the instructions and uninstalled the IDE Channel. After rebooting, I ran the benchmark again and FreshDiagnose now reports the write speed at 30 MB/s. The read speed, however, is being reported at a whooping ~1500 MB/s. Perhaps some of the test data is being cached. But, anyways, everything is back to normal.

Thank You everybody for your help.

Well, It might be an indication that your hard drive is degrading. Check the SMART parameters as well. Try monitor the temperature too. I had a friend who killed his hard drive after operating above 50C for a prolonged period.

I never liked to hibernate anyway. Only used in on my notebook. Never even border to enable it on my desktop. I run my desktop 24/7 too, but I let it download and share files on p2p when I'm not using it.

o, this is a UATA hard drive? That could explain the reason why it's slower on Windows XP. If you have a SATA drive that shouldn't happen. By default Windows XP for some reason disables UATA and pops the drive to ATA.

xboxrulz

I used Seagate tools and did the SMART and some basic tests, none of which reported any anomaly. Temperature is not an issue because I keep the sides of the cabinet open.

The only time my system needs to be turned off is when a power cut occurs. Hibernate is the fastest way to turn it off and the fact that all my work can be resumed from the previous point is a plus. I could easily go on with a Windows with only Restart & Hibernate option .



No, its a standard SATA HDD. I don't think my Intel 915GAG board supports UATA either.