Hard Drive ST380011A Hard drive running extremely slow

[pokeman89]

I used to own 2 Dell Dimension 4600 Desktops bought at the same time. One came with a 2.40GHz Pentium 4 processor, 256MB RAM, a GeForce 4 MX 440, and an 80GB Hard Drive. The second one was purchased with upgrades, and came with a 2.66GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, GeForce FX 5200, and another 80GB Hard drive. For 5 years I used both systems, and noticed that the system with lower specs always ran faster, and I couldn't figure out why. Then the power supply blew on the stronger one and it took out the motherboard with it, so I transferred the HD to the other Dell and moved the peripherals over with it. The Dell is now faster than ever, in fact I am looking at a new processor for it to squeeze a little more power from it, but whenever I access files from the secondary hard drive, it lags and lags. I cannot even play videos at all from it, and music jumps. The only thing that works is text, images (They take an extra half-second to load) and tiny windows apps. The two hard drives are:

Fast One: Unk. ST380011A
Slow One: Maxtor 6Y080L0

I looked them up and both run at 7200RPM. I have a gateway that has a 5400RPM drive and the Maxtor runs worse than that one (funnily enough the gateway has a maxtor too, it's just older). I checked DMA and it was grayed out with the setting set on performance.

What can I do to speed it up? I don't understand why this hard drive is so slow, and why did Dell package the slowest hard drive with the fastest PC anyway?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[bomberboysk]

Its called age, both of those systems are pretty slow, and you purchased it with "upgrades"? As in a used system that someone else upgraded, or one that you had dell add extras to?

Second,dell always uses low end components in their systems.

Reinstalling OS and/or defragging may help.

 

[pokeman89]

I purchased both PCs new from dell.com. When I say upgrades, I mean I customized what processor, graphics card, etc that I wanted from the dell website. Hard drives are both identical and have been running at the same speeds since new. Here's a hint: I can't play GTA2 on the slow one, and that doesn't even require a 32MB video card. Meanwhile I am running the Sims 3 and Flight Simulator X on Med graphics and it is smoother than GTA2 on the other HD (By a large margin) It seems as if there is something else wrong other than age, otherwise the other one would be doing the same thing. Also, the ST380011A is less than half full and the Maxtor has only 276MB free, the maxtor still outperforms the ST380011A. Also, I ran a benchmark test on it, the maxtor scored a 376, and the ST380011A scored 15. That isn't supposed to happen, 15 is practically on par with systems like the Apple II (over 30 years old)


Wait, switch the two models around. the ST380011A runs fast and the Maxtor is slow

Oh, and the slow hard drive doesn't have an OS on it, all it has is text documents and videos I store temporarily until I want to watch them, in which case I transfer them to my 32GB flash drive that works well in watching HD video. the ST380011Aworks well too but I don't have enough space there anymore, too many games.