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

[Peter_S]

Hi just installed Windows XP Pro on a old Dell Dimension 3000 with 1 gig RAM. This machine was running W2000 pro with no problems.
But after installing W XP pro and all the updates the Maxtor 5T040H4 hard drive is running very slow. 

IE takes 45 seconds, Windows Explorer close to 30 seconds and even solitair takes a full 15 seconds to load.

Did a disk clean, ccleaner, registry cleaner, defrag.  None made a difference. Also installed all the original drivers for the D3000 from Dell after the windows updates.

Would appreciate it if someone has some advice on what to do.
Sincerely
Peter

[Edited: Removed personal information per the community rules and regulations.]

[fzabkar]

Windows XP will downgrade a drive's performance from DMA mode to PIO mode if it detects more than 6 CRC errors.

DMA Mode for ATA/ATAPI Devices in Windows XP:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

DMA reverts to PIO:

http://winhlp.com/node/10

Here are two SMART diagnostic tools.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

See this article for SMART info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

I'd look for UDMA errors in the SMART report. These are said to be the result of cabling or communications issues.

I'd also run HD Tune's read benchmark:
http://www.hdtune.com/

[Peter_S]

Thanks for your reply.

I did run hddscan. No issues found. Neither did chkdsk.

Both primary and secondary IDE's are showing Ultra DMA.

I should have mentioned that this disk slow down seem to have started after I installed service pack 2 for XP.  Now I found quite a bit of discussion about it on the internet but none seem to have a a solution other then talking about updating drivers.

So I have re-installed all the Dell drivers/settings. Even IDE and BIOS.  But I am not sure if there is an additional setting, driver or firmware for the Maxtor hard drive itself.

Peter