Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[kingoharts]

I recently assembled a PC from extra parts I had on the shelf.  For some reason the hard drive transfer rates are pinned at 3 MB/sec and I've run out of ideas on what is wrong. 

Any help would be appreciated:

System Configuration

ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5Q-EM

XP Pro SP3
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.67 GHz

4 GB RAM

I ran HD Tune 2.55 and got the following results (see attached word doc)

It's a pretty consistent 3 MB/sec

The 87.9% CPU Usage seems out of wack too

Any ideas would be appreciated.

[Cantbecanit]

Dare I say it, if you have an old O/S on it it's probably configured for another system, and if you've not but do have data from another system on it it's possible Windows has written to the drive (normally a folder with a long mish mash of digits and letters in it's name) and this could be slowing it up, best option I think is to clean it off and start fresh, you might want to try reloading all the drivers first though.hth.

[kingoharts]

Thank you for the quick response.

I thought I took care of previous installs by deleting the old partition, creating a new partition and then doing a long format.

I did not activate AHCI when I installed the OS and from what I've read here, I would need to reinstall the OS if I wanted to activate that feature. 

I did read something on the ASUS site about having your DVDrom and your HD on the same controller.  The P5Q-EM has a 4 port SATA controller and a 2 port SATA controller.  I originally had the HD on SATA 1 and the DVD on SATA 3.  I uninstalled the DVD with no improvements and later installed it on SATA 6 with no improvement.  I have not been able to find details on which controller is attached with which SATA ports but I think I covered most of the possible configurations.

SeaTools seems to be 'fat-n-happy' with the drive but I don't think it tests the throughput rate. 

Doesn't that CPU utilization seem really high to you?  Is the CPU doing ECC tasks?  I saw a previous user having performance problems that posted the results of HD Tune and I think his CPU utilization was around 8%. 

I also ran CrystalDiskMark 3 and got similar results.  Is there a disk tester program that bypasses the OS entirely? 

[Cantbecanit]

Trouble is with doing a driver strip is you still get remnants that play up, try running CCleaner and clean the registry with it, while you are there get the other frees called Speccy and Defraggler, run these and see if it makes a difference,

The AHCi is interesting as you don't have it enabled, this could be slowing it down but I suspect that CPU use is down to loads of seek and can't find tbh, if you are on Vista upwards you can reg hack it easily to enable it,

Enable the AHCI driver in the registry before you change the SATA mode of the boot drive. To do this, follow these steps:

   1. Exit all Windows-based programs.
   2. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
   3. If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
   4. Locate and then click one of the following registry subkeys:
      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV
   5. In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
   6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
   7. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

[kingoharts]

Thanks for sticking with me on this.

I went into regedit to modify the 2 paramters you mentioned.  They were not located in the routing you showed.  They also did not turn up when I did a search for the parameters 'Msahci' and 'IastorV'.

Then I had another thought.  I have a free agent desk unit with a 1.5 TB drive and I tried HDTune on it.  

I was getting a pretty solid 30 MB/sec transfer rate.

Hmmmm . . .

So after watching a you tube video on how to disassmble a Free Agent Desk, I removed the hard drive, an ST31500541AS, Firmware version CC94, and I plugged in to my internal DVD cables.

 I ran HD Tune on this drive and it  started out at 100 MB/sec and slowly dropped to 50 MB/sec at the 100% mark.  I've attatched a word doc with the plot.  (Should I be able to embed the pics into this note?  I can't seem to paste them in.)

Anyway, I have one more test I want to run which is to switch the SATA port and cable for each drive.  If the 31500341 still runs at 3 MB/sec, I'd conclude that the drive is screwed up.

[kingoharts · Accepted solution]

After several experiments I've concluded that the problem is in my motherboard, not my hard drive.  My ST31500341AS performed just fine on SATA3 getting around 100 MB/sec.  I put the ST31500541AS on SATA 1 and it also clamped at around 3 MB/sec.

All the other ports SATA 2, 4, 5, 6 when attached to the boot drive, give a quick blue screen and reboot.  So it appears on SATA 1 and 3 are working and 1 is somehow clamped to 3 MB/sec max.

So I've moved this problem to the ASUS forums to see if I can get it resolved.

Thank you so much for your help and suggestions