Obscenely slow notebook hard drive

[HeaterCore]

After moving cross-country, I'm stuck for awhile with my laptop as my primary computer -- which means I've finally realized how damn slow it is. It's an older Averatec 3225, with a Barton-mobile 2000+, 1GB (single-channel), integrated S3 Unichrome graphics, and a 40GB IBM/Hitachi Travelstar 80GN.

The latter is my first problem target. Everything seems to lag, all the time, except when loaded entirely into memory. I benched it using HD Tach and I'm getting around 2.8MB/s read rates. From what I've read, that's absurd. Even poor 4200RPM drives get 5-7 times that. I've poked around in the BIOS to see if there's something I'm missing, but to no avail.

Any ideas on things to check, or diagnostic tools that might help?

-hc-

 

[btcomm1]

Could be your Hard drive is stuck in PIO mode, that is probably what it is.

There was a page that had a registry fix file on it, for some reason though I can't find the reg file or the page I'll look around and see what I can find.


Ok the page changed the way it looked so here it is.

http://winhlp.com/?q=node/10

If you click on the click here and it does not work, you can right click it and do save target as and then execute the file.

If that doesn't fix your issue then it tells you how to manually reset it to DMA.

Please post back and let me know if this fixes your issue.

 

[HeaterCore]

Originally posted by: btcomm1
Could be your Hard drive is stuck in PIO mode, that is probably what it is.

There was a page that had a registry fix file on it, for some reason though I can't find the reg file or the page I'll look around and see what I can find.

Ok the page changed the way it looked so here it is.

http://winhlp.com/?q=node/10

Bang. There we go.

Read speeds went from 2.8MB/s to 22.4, an eight-fold increase, and burst transfers went from 3 to 89MB/s; CPU utilization went from ~95% during reads to ~4%. Better yet, this fix did the same for my DVD drive, which was to be my next target because I had trouble playing DVDs without occasional skipping.

I can't thank you enough. I had thought of DMA issues because the sequential read curve was flat across the platter instead of declining in a parabola, but my BIOS is set to use DMA, and I hadn't changed it, so I moved on to other possibilities. I've updated drivers, installed extra RAM, played around with different benchmarks, but nothing worked because I'd already considered and discounted the actual cause.

According to the link you posted and this Microsoft support article, multiple CRC or time-out errors cause Windows to revert to lower DMA modes or even PIO (which was where my system had landed). Best guess, coming back from Standby mode out of order (i.e. the system tried to read data before the drive was fully spun-up) caused a bunch of errors. As for the DVD drive, I used it for awhile to rip some old scratched CDs using Exact Audio Copy, which deliberately incurs CRC errors during some operations.

Thanks a ton!

-hc-

 

[btcomm1]

Glad to hear it fixed your issue, did the automatic fix work or did you have to do it manually?

 

[HeaterCore]

Automatic fix worked just fine. Quick and easy solution to a problem that's been bugging me for two weeks. On the bright side, I've got upgraded RAM and more recent drivers, as unnecessary as it may've been....