Hard Disk Drive is very Slow Speed

[Aakarshan.d]

I am facing a strange problem regarding My hard disk drive. I have 120 gb HDD of seagate. It has around 40-50 gb of free space. But still it works very slow. I cannot access the other drives immediately. I have gone through antivirus check but no such problems.

Please provide some help regarding this

[Hardwareman]

Could be a few things...

1) The ribbon cable is bad, replace it ( it should be a 80 wire UDMA cable )...

2) The drive is bad, test it with ( prefferably with a new ribbon cable ), this utility...

3) The drive isn't using UDMA, to check go into Device manager - double click on the IDE/Atapi controllers - double click on the primary or secondary controller ( which ever ont the hard drive is connected to ) - click on the Advanced settings tab - and check to see what the drive is running on, if I'm not misstaken the drive should be UDMA Mode 5 or 6.

[Maxforu]

There is a program called ZIFF DAVIS MEDIA BENCHMARKS that has a good startup manager. It allows you to easily disable any or all programs that open at startup. With Windows start menu you have to search for some programs but not with this one. You can also check and make sure your power management is set to ACPI only. Make sure the DMA box is checked on your HD in device manager. On boot up make sure the bios detects your HD as a ATA 100 or 133 and it is set to PIO Mode 4. You can increase the speed of your HD 100% or more by also removing the PNP BIOS and EXTENTION BOARD BIOS and replacing them with ACPI BIOS and EXTENTION BOARD ACPI BIOS. I had to reformat my HD after removing the PNP BIOS but it was worth it because my burst rate went from 15 meg per sec to 77.5 meg per sec.

[Killen]

It could be a setting in the BIOS, a bad cable, or drive causing it to be in PIO mode.

I don't know exactally where in your BIOS, but under one of the menus, there may be a setting ( some BIOS' have it some don't ), for a UDMA setting for the Master and Slave on each channel ( I'm thinking maybe in the Advanced settings ), try setting it to Auto...

Also in the Standard Settings menu in the BIOS look under the Type and Mode settings for that drive and make sure it is set to Auto ( if it wasn't write down the previous settings, just to make sure that if something goes wrong you can set it back ).

To test the drive download, the PowerMax utility in the link in my previous post.

If this just started though, it may be a bad drive or cable.

[T.J.]

Maybe you were running a program that was accessing the drive at the same time you were running the program (virus scanning?). Try it again after disableing programs that use the HDD.