slow hd in win xp

[m@zon]

A few weeks ago my old ibm 75gxp crached and i have recently got a new 60gxp and installed winxp. My problem is that my new hd seems to be much slower that the old one.
It takes several seconds just to open the smallest mpg file, and i can hear the drive swapping almost constantly.
I used to have 2 partitions on my old hd, one ntfs for windows and some programs and a fat32 for mp3 and movies and such. I tried this setup with my new hd aswell but i felt that it was slower that the oldone. I got a tip not to use different filesystems so i converted my fat to a ntfs but the disk still feels slow. I have tried various settings of the pagefile aswell (on my last hd i didnt use a pagefile att all) but nothing has resolved the problem.
I dont know what else to test, i dont want to think that my newer hd is actually slower that the old one. Is there any way to see which programs that are writing/reading from the hd at a sertain time ie when the hd is swapping?

[ReSpAwN DeMoN]

What's the size of the drive? And also when was the last time you defragged. Maybe with the huge load of software something like that may be needed. Also do you have alot of programs constantly running in the background that may be using alot of HD activity?

[brooksto]

man I registered just so i could pass this info along. I was having the same slow hd performance, thought it may be my imagination so i benchmarked my hd with hd tach and i was getting like 4mbps on a 7200 rpm maxtor hd. WTF! I said. So I research online, finally found out windows xp "steps down" the dma mode everytime there is some error. So I was stuck in pio mode. Go check out http://www.overclockers.com/tips839/ for the full info. Back up to speed now. So far I have not found anyway to turn off this "feature" of windows xp so i guess I will have to check the primary ide controller periodically and make sure it is still in the correct dma mode. Hope that helps!

Brian

[Wiggo]

As far as I know, you can't turn this feature off and I'm really not sure that you'd want to as it serves as part of the file protection system. The mode changes downwards to safe guard files from corruption. The fix is generally easy enough but I have had to replace 2 IBM drives because they just would not play in ppl's setups though (would refuse to come out of PIO mode). : peace2:
<center>:cheers:</center>

[SegiY]

Question?
After buying 1 IBM and having it die, whay did you get a second?

[PersianImmortal]

I have an IBM 60GXP 40GB and it works perfectly well and quite fast too. Had it for over a year without any problems. Benches around 89MB/S bandwidth, 38MB/S sequential (NTFS in WinXP).

What you need to do is firstly read my WinXP Guide (sticky at top) for the right cache settings to optimise drive performance. The other tip is, as brooksto said, that sometimes when the system has problems with an IDE controller it steps it back to PIO mode but still shows UDMA in Device Manager. The way to fix that is to toggle UDMA off (click OK), then toggle it back on.

Either way, it's a software setting that's gone astray, as these drives are both reliable and fast. It was the 75GXPs that had build problems.

Also, there's a firmware update for the 60GXP which will make sure it doesn't die. It can be found here - although IBM don't publicly tell people about the firmware for some reason. I flashed my drive 5 months ago and it sounds and performs perfectly.

[Wiggo]

[b]Also, there's a firmware update for the 60GXP which will make sure it doesn't die. It can be found here - although IBM don't publicly tell people about the firmware for some reason. I flashed my drive 5 months ago and it sounds and performs perfectly.

But why should ppl have to do that when the drive shouldn't have been marketed in the first place in the condition that it was? They should have received a trouble free drive that just plugged in and that's that.

No sorry but after the 75's that's just too much to take and just goes to show a large lack of quality control. No informed consumer is goin' to go close to an IBM drive with those sorts of things goin' on. In the last 6yrs no other HDD that I know of has caused more pain, even all those Maxtors that just up and died without warning hardly rate a mention when compared.

Sorry but that's a <img src="http://users.skynet.be/gedi/emoticons4u/mad/1106.gif"> for me with shoddy products. : peace2:
<center>:cheers:</center>

[SegiY]

yeah, wooo, *cheer*

I fully agree (with wiggo)

[PersianImmortal]

Fair enough, I just wanted to let current owners of 60GXPs know that the drive is not inherently slow, and that you can avoid having it break down (if indeed the 60GXPs are prone to this problem). I'm not suggesting people should rush out and buy an IBM drive :)

The firmware update is just insurance in my opinion. Up until the point when I flashed my drive it has been running without a hitch for 7 months.

On the plus side, the 60GXPs are quite fast, so if you're having speed problems try all the things I've suggested. Unless you hear funny noises from your drive then the speed problems are 99% likely to be from poor software settings not a physical fault.

In particular, on the 2nd page of my WinXP guide there is a link to a small utility called HDSpeed. Download it, use it and provide your results. Mine are in my previous post for comparison.

[FanG]

At the top of this post a mention was made that having 2 different types
of partitions on your Win XP hard drive can hurt performance.

I have NTFS for Win32 and FAT32 for GHOST images of my PC.

Can someone confirm if this is really a bad setup???

Thanks.

:?: