Excruciatingly slow disk speed

jmart38 · 26th August 2010, 4:27 PM

For awhile now on my system I've been able to manage like 3-4mb/s max disk to disk or over a network on my main desktop. It often sits below 1mb/s though, all my drives are sata 7200...

I think it may just be a shit sata controller? (ASUS P5LD2)

At work at the moment I'm getting 20mb/s and right up to 90mb/s transferring from 1 sata to another accross a gigabit network (but only using a cat5 cable and the drives are regular 7200rpm desktop drives)

Any ideas why this would be?

edit: oh yeah, sometimes this machine sits there FOREVER at the bios screen waiting to post. Sometimes it's quick, sometimes it takes 5 minutes, and sometimes it requires a reset... farked mobo?

Shreaver · 27th August 2010, 5:02 AM

Possibly the motherboard. But, usually when a disk is near its end of life, it starts to behave with ridiculously low speeds. I've had one hit the kilobytes, before.

Dude, back up your stuff, pronto.

jmart38 · 27th August 2010, 7:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shreaver

Possibly the motherboard. But, usually when a disk is near its end of life, it starts to behave with ridiculously low speeds. I've had one hit the kilobytes, before.

Dude, back up your stuff, pronto.

The problem applies to two of my newer drives aswell. a 500gb WD and a 1tb Seagate.

My other two drives are seagate 320, they're getting quite old now.

Thanks for the tip.

thebrad · 27th August 2010, 8:52 AM

If its happening to all your drives its likely your motherboard. But you could try your hard drives in another machine to rule them out as the problem for good.

jmart38 · 27th August 2010, 9:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thebrad

If its happening to all your drives its likely your motherboard. But you could try your hard drives in another machine to rule them out as the problem for good.

The machine is really bogging down. The Win7 install on it is pretty fresh, I don't use the PC for gaming much anymore, mainly streaming to my PS3... it's getting a pretty easy life.

I'm considering giving my system a refresh with a new motherboard. Maybe a new cpu if money permits.

Is the E8400 on a 775 board still good value for money these days? Don't really need to go to i5/i7 and ddr3 at this stage.

ChaosMaster · 27th August 2010, 9:49 AM

IF you have tested it out with all your HDD then it's the MB. However, I've seen similar problems with WD Green drives, where after you turn on the computer, it slows down to a near hault, as if under huge load, then after half an hr, it speeds up again only to slow down a few hrs later. This is a common problem as WD Green are shit drives. Now if your WD drive is Green, or your Seagate drive is failing, and it's your main OS drive then this could be the problem as if the main drive is dying/shit then the other drives will be slow as well.

jmart38 · 27th August 2010, 9:52 AM

Nope, it's a Blue. We have a green at work that shit itself. Stayed away from them since then.

My OS is on one of the partitioned 320's. The 1tb is for games and software, the 500gb is for music and video.

You may be right, the drive the OS is on may very well be buggered. The 500gb will stream happily to my ps3 at 10-14mb/s, maybe more if I ever try HD content. It's only when transferring files from one disk to another, or from my laptop to one of the drives that it's stupidly slow.

I have reason to believe the motherboard is letting go though. 2 out of 4 ram slots on it have all but given up.

Shreaver · 27th August 2010, 10:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmart38

Nope, it's a Blue. We have a green at work that shit itself. Stayed away from them since then.

My OS is on one of the partitioned 320's. The 1tb is for games and software, the 500gb is for music and video.

You may be right, the drive the OS is on may very well be buggered. The 500gb will stream happily to my ps3 at 10-14mb/s, maybe more if I ever try HD content. It's only when transferring files from one disk to another, or from my laptop to one of the drives that it's stupidly slow.

I have reason to believe the motherboard is letting go though. 2 out of 4 ram slots on it have all but given up.

Whoa, dude. How old is this?

jmart38 · 27th August 2010, 10:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shreaver

Whoa, dude. How old is this?

Ummm, P5LD2.

I'll dig through my posts here to see when I got the new system :P

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmart38

3rd August 2007, 10:10 PM
I'm at 2.52 ghz so far and am getting 50-55 degrees celcius at 100% load, would this be hinting plenty more o/c power left in it?

Thanks for the help guys.

Older than that post. So It's given me a fair whack of use over it's life. I used to OC with it a fair bit (nothing extreme) And it's proved to be pretty reliable up until the last few months.

IG-72 · 27th August 2010, 12:12 PM

I actually ran into this same scenario when I was doing some lab work. Copying from Disk to Disk was going around 1-2 MB/s. I fiddled with some stuff and found this made it go to 50 MB/s. I just hope you don't already have it configured.

Enable Write Caching

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...e-disable.html

jmart38 · 27th August 2010, 12:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IG-72

I actually ran into this same scenario when I was doing some lab work. Copying from Disk to Disk was going around 1-2 MB/s. I fiddled with some stuff and found this made it go to 50 MB/s. I just hope you don't already have it configured.

Enable Write Caching

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...e-disable.html

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out when I get home.

vien · 27th August 2010, 5:10 PM

hi,

it may be the motherboard, specifically the sata controller. I've had similar problems with my sata drives on my old nvidia board. ports 3&4 were based on a different controller, jmicron i think, 1&2 were the standard stuff. Randomly it would just hang on the bios screen. Copy speeds were quite low when it did initialise. I swapped the drives out and tested in a different pc, all good, fast as normal. In my case it was the ports 3&4 that died - shit controller.

v

jmart38 · 30th August 2010, 2:35 PM

Well, I've unplugged my IDE ribbon... it now get through the bios crap MUCH quicker. It must have been pausing on an IDE check somewhere along the line. I guess I'll only plug my dvd drive in when I plan to use it.

(It wasn't the dvd drive causing the issue, tried a HDD on the same cable - same issue)

26th August 2010, 4:27 PM	#1
jmart38 (Banned or Deleted) Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: ಠ_ಠ Brisbane Posts: 7,175	Excruciatingly slow disk speed For awhile now on my system I've been able to manage like 3-4mb/s max disk to disk or over a network on my main desktop. It often sits below 1mb/s though, all my drives are sata 7200... I think it may just be a shit sata controller? (ASUS P5LD2) At work at the moment I'm getting 20mb/s and right up to 90mb/s transferring from 1 sata to another accross a gigabit network (but only using a cat5 cable and the drives are regular 7200rpm desktop drives) Any ideas why this would be? edit: oh yeah, sometimes this machine sits there FOREVER at the bios screen waiting to post. Sometimes it's quick, sometimes it takes 5 minutes, and sometimes it requires a reset... farked mobo? Last edited by jmart38; 26th August 2010 at 5:00 PM.

27th August 2010, 9:49 AM	#6
ChaosMaster Member Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Vic, 3175 Posts: 1,225	IF you have tested it out with all your HDD then it's the MB. However, I've seen similar problems with WD Green drives, where after you turn on the computer, it slows down to a near hault, as if under huge load, then after half an hr, it speeds up again only to slow down a few hrs later. This is a common problem as WD Green are shit drives. Now if your WD drive is Green, or your Seagate drive is failing, and it's your main OS drive then this could be the problem as if the main drive is dying/shit then the other drives will be slow as well. __________________ 1. Lian LI A71FB \| Asus P6X58D Premium \| i7-930 @ 3.99 1.2v \| Corsair H50 \| Corsair XMS 3x2GB DDR3 1800 C8 1.66v \| Gigabyte GTX570 \| OCZ V2 120GB + 5x 1TB WD Black+ 2x 7K3000 + 1.5TB + 750GB\| QFAN 750w \| Xonar HDAV1.3 Deluxe \| Sennheiser HD555 \| G9 + Topre RealForce + G35 \| Check out my FLICKR USB and SD card review

27th August 2010, 12:12 PM	#10
IG-72 Member Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Indiana Posts: 629	I actually ran into this same scenario when I was doing some lab work. Copying from Disk to Disk was going around 1-2 MB/s. I fiddled with some stuff and found this made it go to 50 MB/s. I just hope you don't already have it configured. Enable Write Caching http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...e-disable.html __________________ Comp 1: Q6600 @ 3.6 Ghz * ASUS P5E Intel X38 * 4 gig G.Skill PC1066 * XFX GTX 260 Black Edition * 4x Intel G2 80 Gig SSDs RAID 0* NEC DVD-R/CD-R * X-Fi XtremeMusic PCDB Comp 2: VIA M-9000, 128 MB PC2100, 15 Gig Maxtor HDD, Onboard everything else, Inside VCR. PCDB Too many computers to name.

27th August 2010, 5:10 PM	#12
vien Member Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 190	hi, it may be the motherboard, specifically the sata controller. I've had similar problems with my sata drives on my old nvidia board. ports 3&4 were based on a different controller, jmicron i think, 1&2 were the standard stuff. Randomly it would just hang on the bios screen. Copy speeds were quite low when it did initialise. I swapped the drives out and tested in a different pc, all good, fast as normal. In my case it was the ports 3&4 that died - shit controller. v __________________ "I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world." - Bertrand Russell

27th August 2010, 5:02 AM	#2
Shreaver Member Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Queenland Posts: 1,251	Possibly the motherboard. But, usually when a disk is near its end of life, it starts to behave with ridiculously low speeds. I've had one hit the kilobytes, before. Dude, back up your stuff, pronto.

27th August 2010, 8:52 AM	#4
thebrad Member Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Adelaide, Australia Posts: 168	If its happening to all your drives its likely your motherboard. But you could try your hard drives in another machine to rule them out as the problem for good.

27th August 2010, 9:52 AM	#7
jmart38 (Banned or Deleted) Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: ಠ_ಠ Brisbane Posts: 7,175	Nope, it's a Blue. We have a green at work that shit itself. Stayed away from them since then. My OS is on one of the partitioned 320's. The 1tb is for games and software, the 500gb is for music and video. You may be right, the drive the OS is on may very well be buggered. The 500gb will stream happily to my ps3 at 10-14mb/s, maybe more if I ever try HD content. It's only when transferring files from one disk to another, or from my laptop to one of the drives that it's stupidly slow. I have reason to believe the motherboard is letting go though. 2 out of 4 ram slots on it have all but given up.

30th August 2010, 2:35 PM	#13
jmart38 (Banned or Deleted) Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: ಠ_ಠ Brisbane Posts: 7,175	Well, I've unplugged my IDE ribbon... it now get through the bios crap MUCH quicker. It must have been pausing on an IDE check somewhere along the line. I guess I'll only plug my dvd drive in when I plan to use it. (It wasn't the dvd drive causing the issue, tried a HDD on the same cable - same issue)