VVVeeeerrrryyyy SSlllooowww Hard drive

Factual Questions
1

Windows XP Home, SP1, with two hard drives:

C: Maxtor 40G UDMA drive with NTFS, ~4yrs old.
D: WDC 10G drive with FAT, even older.

My son, who’s six, flipped the computer rapidly on and off a couple of times in an attemp to fix a game. This may have been in response to, or perhaps the cause of, the apparent slowness of the system.

Tests:
A copy from D: to C: took about 15 seconds.
A copy from C: to D: took about 4 minutes.

A backup from C: to D: of ~9G information took over six hours.

McAfee Virus Scan has been shutdown for all of this.

Either C: is reading slow or D: is writing slow.

All actions that read an application from the C: drive (outlook, ie, games, etc.) are very slow and you could write a russian novel in the time it takes to boot the box. Scandisk (or what passes for it in XP) passes the drive (after waiting forever). BIOS shows the drive as a type 4 UDMA device.

I suspect that I’ve lost some subtle aspect of the hard drive’s read-ahead or caching electronics or perhaps some fault in the IDE controller (on-board, A7V333-X motherboard.).

I’ve downloaded the maxtor test program & will run it tonight, if I can fix this work server. I’m tempted to disconnect the D drive, & move the C drive to its IDE cable to see if the problem persists. Good? Any ideas to test & resolve?

Makes me wish for a Linux install so I can play with /dev/null & /dev/full & dd to diagnose but oh-well…

-B

2

Most of the time drive slowdown on a previously adequately performing system is due to:

1: The drive being almost full and there being insufficient swap space

2: CPU and system resources needed for processing IO being grabbed by some other application(s), viruses or spyware

3: Media defects

If you eliminate 1 and 2, 3 is the most likely.

3

Do you have a “Turbo” button that your son could have accidentally toggled off during his button pushing?

I only ask because the exact same thing happened to my brother’s computer. Since it was a toggle button with no visible feedback that it was on/off he had no idea it had been turned off. (He had no idea what it was to begin with, but I digress).

4

Have you defragged the disk lately? I don’t see it creating that large a performance hit, but it is worth a try if just to satisfy curiosity.

5

The manufacturers’ utilities may turn up problems that CHKDSK missed.

Maxtor PowerMax
Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools

6

Oops, you already got that. Never mind.

Moving the drives around to isolate the problem is a good idea.

7

I would unplug it from zee wall for a full minute & then plug back in. Then I would run defrag & scandisk. You do run defrag often, right?

8

In addition to running Disk Degragmenter and ensuring you have adequate space for a swapfile, alteady mentioned, I’d check two other things – is there a buildup of .tmp files in your Temp directory? (Different versions of Windows place this in different locations, so I won’t guess where specifically it’s located on your system.) And have you purged your Internet cache – which can have several dozen megabytes of HTML pages and graphics from your use of the Internet? This can be done in MSIE by pulling down Tools/Internet Options, opening the “General” tab, and hitting the “Delete Files” button about halfway down the dialog box. You can access the same thing from your desktop by using Start/Settings/Control Panel, clicking on Internt Options, and continuing as above. You might also find out what your machine loads at startup and whether any of it can be eliminated from automatically loading then. After finishing all of this (and defrag after clearing out the temporary stuff), do a “cold” reboot – from a completely shut-down system. However, I have a hunch it’s probably more subtle in your particular case, and the product of your son’s rapid on/off switching – but those are things improving speed that have helped me in the past.

9

Just a followup, it was the drive itself.

I tried the drive on both IDE busses it it was slow on both. I noticed, though, that being off overnight (not usual) would allow it to run fast for the first 5-10 minutes when it would slow back down.

When I pulled the drive and made it slave for its new master (80G Maxtor) it was hot, hot, hot to the touch. It was slow as a slave, too, and the new master works zippy fast.

So, some drive fault that wasn’t terminal (thank God) but was definitely causing degradation. My bet is a bad bearing heating the drive until it became too hot to run well.

10

Glad you figured it out.

I recently had an issue with a LaCie external HD. I was doing extensive data processing on it, and noticed after some time that it would slow down and eventually quit.

According to them, most drives will spin down when overheating to prevent data loss. This is a safeguard, apparently.