Solved Poor Hard Drive Performance?

System Specs:
AMD 64 x2 6000+
Abit AN9
4GB RAM
GeForce 8800GT SLI
250GB WD SATA HDD
Vista 64 Ultimate with SP1
Forceware version 15.01
version 177.79 gfx drivers

not sure what else would be helpful for hardware/drivers


Ive been having some serious performance issues with hard drive xfer speed and performance, but I am not sure if I can narrow it down specifically to the HDD. The primary time where I get bad performance is when downloading files. It all started when I first installed vista and was downloading all of the updates and SP1. After a brutal night of waiting around for the files to download and install (I'm talking hours), performance did a huge jump, but was still sub par from before I reinstalled. Currently when downloading files from EA store, bittorrent, or any large file, say Vista SP1, my computer slows down to a halt. I defrag weekly, used an external defrag program for >64MB files. I used the tutorial to increase SATA drive performance, tried a few other tweaks on the tutorial forums, but nothing seems to work. It seems to be much worse when I try to unzip/unrar or otherwise process large amounts on my HDD. Ive done virus scans, spyware scans, used system optimizers, but I think im missing something.

If anyone has any idea, your help would be much appreciated.

I aways tell people to check for bad SATA contacts and bad SATA cable.

Other then that, you can get a super fast HDD or raid 0 two quick HDDS. On top of that, over clock you cpu would help.

Good luck and keep us up to date.

Blitz, try this software out for diagnosing HDD problems:

HD Tune

The software will allow you to run several low-level tests on your drive including benchmarks and error scans, and also allows you to monitor the temperature. You can compare your results to what is standard for your drive.

It will also give you S.M.A.R.T. data, if your drive supports it.

Hopefully this will get you closer to your solution...

Hi Blitzgp,

You might see if these can help you improve the performance.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/59886-hard-drive-speed-boosts.html

and

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/81176-speed-up-performance-vista.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Perhaps your problem is network related. How are you connecting to the internet?

i found a work around and im not sure how it got messed up in the first place, but...

in device manager, i went to my sata controller, went to verify that dma mode was selected and decided to uncheck the block that says let the bios decide. works like a champ now

hmm useful tip, wonder why its set as default like that.

blitzgp said:

i found a work around and im not sure how it got messed up in the first place, but...

in device manager, i went to my sata controller, went to verify that dma mode was selected and decided to uncheck the block that says let the bios decide. works like a champ now

Click to expand...

Strange, I would think that would be for a IDE Channel device in it's Advanced Settings tab instead of a SATA one. Could you post a screenshot of this item?

Thank you,
Shawn

Umm, how interesting. I have not seen this before. Must be something proprietary for NVIDIA brand motherboards. :huh:

Would you recommend unticking it?

I suppose you could test it with it ticked and not ticked to see if it makes any performance difference for the hard drive transfer speeds. You could copy a very large file from one location to another to test how fast it copies.

i unclicked it and it worked for me. right now im having other problems that i had in another thread when installing a second sata drive. i guess lots of other people are having problems as well. i had a WD 250gig hd and i just bought a 500gb seagate. when i initially reinstalled windows 64 ultimate, it detected my second drive as thats where i was storing all my patches, updates, drivers etc. on on of the reboots, my WD drive disappeared, but device manager was still detecting it, just as an unknown device. after deleting it and rebooting, it came back detected. something about nvidia's SATA drivers is messing it up. however i no longer have that screen i mentioned available, but im not having any problems with transfer speed. nvidia drivers are very screwy right now, as 2 forceware driver versions ago i was getting infinate loop BSOD. safe mode would not work either, had to reformat and reinstall windows. right now i have a new nvidia sata driver available from windows update, but i have a feeling that is whats causing the problems for me.

Blitzgp,

Are these SATA RAID or just standard SATA drivers? If you are not using a RAID setup, then they can cause problems with RAID drivers installed. Usually your motherboard's chipset drivers will included any standard SATA drivers in it instead.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

normal sata, no RAID

right now i have drivers and everything appears to be working fine.
however the drivers are from 2006 from microsft/nvdia probaly wehn they sent the drivers to be included with vista.

Ok, it's most likely then.