Topic: XP drive is suddenly slow [solved]

[it-goes-to-eleven]

Suddenly, the 1TB drive on my DAW box is slow.   The drive is fine under linux - 80MB/sec.  But in XP, it is only 2 to 3 MB/sec.  I suspect it is not going into ultra dma mode, or something similar.  It was fine a few weeks ago.  I use the machine only rarely.  In order to prevent virus problems and assure stability, it does not have a network connection.  It is remotely possible it picked up a virus from a thumb drive, but unlikely.

There are only two drives, a 320 GB and a 1TB.  They are both on the internal SATA bus.  The performance of the 320GB is fine.  I have tried swapping SATA ports between the drives.

I've tried going back to previous windows restore points, but it says nothing has changed. I've reviewed the bios settings..  Kinda baffled.  It is a presario that has worked fine for years.

From what I've read on the net, I may have to re-install windows.  I'm hoping to avoid that.

Any thoughts?

[anonymous_user]

Probably not your problem, but one sign that a drive is about to die is if it starts working noticably slower, especially in file-copy operations (both to and from the drive). I had this happen with one of my drives, at first I thought it seemed slower when copying a show to it, but didn't really think anything of it, until after a while I noticed that all file copying with it was going so slow, and that other drives were still fine. After a few more weeks, it died altogether.

Besides using something like chkdsk, you could try doing other file copy operations to it a lot and see if you get any errors. You could also try loading a bunch of torrents onto it, mainly 3-4gb dvd torrents, and see if any errors come up while downloading them, since torrents use constant writing over a longer period of time. If any of those things happen then it's a sure sign the drive is dying and has problems. The fact that it seems fine with linux, I have no idea. Other than that, I can't help, but good luck.

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

If the portion of the drive with Linux on it is in good shape, but the XP portion has bad sectors you may see a slowdown on only one OS.

I would download the diagnostic software from the drive manufacturer and run the full test on it. Don't do the quick test, it usually won't find anything unless it's critical.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

Thanks for the suggestions.   It is a data drive, with multiple ntfs partitions.  The files are all large scans, so fragmentation is not a factor.  All of the partitions are accessed from both linux and windows, and exhibit the problem.   In this case, my use of linux is just as a diagnostic (and to move data).  I've run short SMART diags on the drive.   I think the drive is fine, and it is backed up.

I will try the manufacturer diags, maybe they'll provide some insight into the windows aspect.

[bgreen]

We just had some huge issues at work with PC's running XP where the viruses were pinpointed as coming from flash drives. Not saying thats whats up with yours, but its not uncommon. Unfortunately, there are many computer viruses that specifically target USB flash drives and use them to spread from computer to computer.Not saying it's what happened with yours but if you use your thumb drive on a public network or another PC thats possibly infected, I certainly wouldnt rule it out. Our network is locked up like fort knox. After this last issue that took down our system across three states for two days, IT issued us all thumb drives that are only to be used on our work computers.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

Ugh... This is resolved.  The issue was the SATA 3 drive not falling back to lower SATA spec.  Apparently it had been doing so, and stopped.  I had to jumper the drive to force the slower SATA spec.

Along the way, I wasted a bunch of time trying to upgrade the bios of an old sil3114 sata  card.. Lousy docs and tools.  Fun times!

Anyway, I'm not the first to be bitten by this.  Also, a bunch of western digital drives went out with an error in the labeling regarding the jumper to enable this.  My label doesn't have the error - it actually doesn't mention forcing backward compat at all.  If it had mentioned it, I would have remembered it and probably solved this very quickly.