Slow SATA rates

6

69mako

New Member
This week I've noticed that my computer has slowed down. I ran virus checks, spyware checks, registry cleans, and defraged the drive. Nothing changed. I notice most of the lag during boot up. It takes several minutes now. Just for curiousity sake, I ran a benchmark of my HD and it came back with transfer rates half of SATA150. This is a SATA300 WD 250GB drive. I have added nothing new to the system, nor changed anything recently. I get no errors on my screen either. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to try next? What tests to run? etc? I'm running the latest BIOS on my MB too.

Thanks,
Mako
 
What speeds were reported in the test? Sustained transfer for an 7200 RPM drive will not be close to the SATA150 limit.
 
Thanks for the reply. Using PW Wizard 2007 I ran a benchmark of this drive. Here are the results

Sequential Writing : 23.91 MB/s (Cpu usage : 13%)
Sequential Read : 14.56 MB/s (Cpu usage : 3%)
Buffered Writing : 25.87 MB/s (Cpu usage : 11%)
Buffered Reading : 14.79 MB/s (Cpu usage : 4%)
Random Reading : 14 MB/s (Cpu usage : 5%)


Here is some info about the drive:

General Information :
Disk Type : Hard Disk
Peripheral Type : ATA
Model : WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0
Free Space : 74%

Drive Information :
Volume Name : Main
Serial Number : E837-F77F
Files Name : 255
File Management : NTFS
Volume is Compressed : No
Case Sensitive Search : Yes
Preserves Filename Case : Yes
Unicode Filenames : Yes
Access Control List : Yes
Named Streams : Yes
Object Identifiers : Yes
Reparse Points : Yes
Sparse Files : Yes
User Disk Quotas : Yes
Individual File Compression : Yes
Encryption : No
Share : No

Logical Features :
Sectors per Cluster : 8
Bytes per Sector : 512
Cluster size : 4 KB
Free Clusters : 45211593
Total Clusters : 61046992

Physical Features :
Cylinders : 30401
Heads : 255
Sectors per Track : 63
Bytes per Sector : 512

Thanks,
Mako
 
Hm that is defiently too slow. You should get at least double that speed in sustained read/write (closer to 60MB/s) with a minimum speed around 35MB/s.

It almost looks like it's running in UDMA-1 (except for the buffered transfer which exceeds the max speed of it slightly).

You haven't NTFS compressed/encrypted the disk or anything have you?
 
69mako said:
Volume is Compressed : No
Click to expand...

:P

So this is a recent occurance and not from a new build? It still couldn't hurt to install/reinstall drivers for your motherboard. Also, I'm not totally sure if this would affect such readings, but have you defrag'ed recently? Disk Keeper Lite is a great free program to defrag your HD.
 
Sure point out that I didn't read every line jerk :P I see it's also not encrypted but that also required more reading then I would like.

Speeds are faster than PIO allows but in device manager find IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers -> go to the Properties for the Primary/Secondary Channel -> Advanced Settings -> make sure both boxes say "DMA if Available" not "PIO Only"
 
Cromwell,
Turns out you were right. After I send the info in my previous post, I though I would try and reinstall drivers. Turns out that this drive was set in PIO mode. I changed it back to SATA 3.0 and all is well again. Rates are back where they should be.

Thanks to all who let me pick through their brain with this issue. I was ready to take apart the computer and start switching cables, ports, etc. If that didn't work, I was ready to buy a new drive

Mako
 
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