Extremely Slow Hdd Operations On Windows Xp

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

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.

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

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 :|

[BuffaloHelp 24]

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.

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

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.

[faulty.lee 0]

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.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/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

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

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 :|

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

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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

 

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.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/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

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.

[faulty.lee 0]

I have been continuously doing this for the last two years and my old drive didn't have this problem.

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.

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

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

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

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.

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 .

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

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

[iGuest 3]

Slow Hard disk opertions

Extremely Slow Hdd Operations On Windows Xp

 

Hi !! I had ubuntu installed in my 40GB hard disk. Then I formated it using XP cd . Now I'm using Xp installed in my 80GB hard disk. The problem is, the operations on my 40GB hard disk are too slow (it takes 5-6 min to copy 100mb). I cant format it using Xp. It says "windows is unable to format the drive. Quit any utilities or other programs that are using this drive, and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of drive. Then try formatting again." I tried to reinstall the hard disk but the problem persists. The disk was working properly before installing Ubuntu. What to do ?? Please help !!

 

-question by Rohan

[iGuest 3]

Hard-disk suddenly very slow in XPExtremely Slow Hdd Operations On Windows XpMy Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA disk (7200.11) has suddenly became very slow. Booting XP SP3 takes 7-8 mins, and then everything seemed to be taking forever. I found out that Fragmentation was minimal, and I have 2GB RAM and 9GB free space on the disk. SiSoft Sandra's Benchmark found that at all locations on the hard-disk the speed was about constant at a pathetic 3.6MBps. It is normally 95MBps at the edge to 60MBps at the center. I checked the connections inside the CPU and everything seemed fine.I feared the worst, that the HD was dying (though it has 3.5yrs warranty remaining), as I had heard some abnormal "tock"ing and scratching (the kind I only hear when the PC starts) sounds the previous day while I was working in Vista (which is on a different partition).Now, the strange thing is that in Vista, everything is perfect--the benchmarks report the usual high values, the system boots and shuts down in no time, and applications (including heavy games) are running superbly. For the past two days (in Vista) there have been no sounds either.I ran a full chkdsk on the XP drive (from Vista, boot-time) and the final report showed 4KB of bad sectors.Since a lot of software is on my XP partition I don't want to have to format and reinstall it. Help!-question by AnkurTG

[iGuest 3]

SolutionExtremely Slow Hdd Operations On Windows XpCheck the Transfer mode of your hard disk by:Right click my computer---> properties--> device manager-->IDE ATA controllers-->Primary IDE channel-->Advanced settingsAnd make sure that the current transfer mode is ultra "DMA" not "PIO"To change it from PIO to Ultra DMA use this script file http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ and restart yout computerThe thing is that PIO transfer mode is much slower than DMA ...Windows XP changes the transfer mode to PIO automatically after 6 CRC failures and-reply by Mahmoud Sherif

[iGuest 3]

thanks faulty.leeExtremely Slow Hdd Operations On Windows Xp

Hi guys, thanks so much for this feedback; I've been working with xp pro for years (and fixing other people's comps) but never encountered this problem. I googled with "pc slow after standby hard drive read write speed" and thankfully ended up here!

My case was, I entered standby and after waking up it crashed my session. After reboot, xp booted extremely slow and operation was very slow as well. After some obvious tests I figured it must've been the HDD, but CHKDSK (which was extremely slow as well) reported nothing. I'm using a SATA HDD 320 GB from Samsung and a Seagate SATA HDD of 1 TB. I've been using both for about 2 years and they're both about 70% full. They were both slowed down so I figured it couldn't have been a hardware problem with my HDD.

Thanks faulty.Lee for posting the solution;  XP had set the IDE transfer mode to PIO. Dude, I never knew this but I'm so happy right now, it's like my pc was in a coma and is now wide awake (with coffee)   thanks again!  I'll follow your advise and will be scheduling some tests to ensure my HDD's health.

-reply by Vincent

[iGuest 3]

There are three main reasons that computer slows down:  

 1.  registry errors

 2. Spyware and adware

 3. Viruses.

 Actually, however, according to the statistics, 90% of computer problems are caused by computer registry, so it is important to constantly clean up your computer registry to ensure that your computer runs in a good condition. Now there are two good software on the Internet: Tuneup360 and Norton systemwork, but the latter one is a little bit difficult. For the beginners, Tuneup360 is a good choice. I don’t know why. Everybody is talking registry cleaning now. It seems your computer can be faster if you clean registry, so I try the tuneup360. It is not free, but it will give a free license if I agree to do a customer survey. I do feel my computer runs faster after that. 

-reply by wrboer

 

[iGuest 3]

320 Gb Samsung harddisk working slow on XP but perfectly on Windows 7Extremely Slow Hdd Operations On Windows Xp

Hello, previsouly I was using windows XP on 80gb seagate sata hard. Now when I installed a new 320gb samsung hardddisk on my HP530 laptop, even newly installed XP works very slowly on it, but Windows 7 is working excellent. I can't understand the problem that why XP is running very slowly on it and it windows even helds sometime. I even checked the Primary IDE mode and it is UltraDMA  Mode 5. Please help!!

-reply by Hammad Riaz