SLow hard drive problem (NOT DMA)

[wicked1]

I have 4 hard drives in this machine. 2 WD 250 Gig Special Edition(8 meg cache) and 2 Maxtor 160 Gig( 8meg cache). I have been having problems with simultaneous burns again and I narrowed it down to the hard drive not keeping up. I ran Sandra 2004 and none of my drives go higher than 7.9 meg a sec. They are all on their own channels as master. 2 onboard and 2 on Promise 133TX2 card.I swapped out the controller card with a silicon image 680 and still the same results. They are all in DMA 5 or 6. I'm stumped.They used to fly.I run O&O Defrag on these drives regularly and I just ran it yesterday. I also tried swapping out the round cables with standard 80 wire cables (flat).This sucks as this is what I do for a living and cant figure this out.

[aviationwiz]

Why do you need 820GB's of Hard Drive Space? LOL. Sorry, can't help you with the problem.

[wicked1]

Well I was defragging again and the power surged.I just lost 250 gigs of data.I am now installing Win 2000 sp4 and I moved all hard drives to the onboard raid connections and all opticals on the onboard channels and a silicon image 680.I havent installed Sandra yet to test but hopefully it was just something wrong with win xp.
Either way I'm very angry about the 250 gigs lost.

[TheWizard]

Ahh, you never can have too much space, can you?

Originally, I was going to say it's the Promise 133TX2. I'm using the one that came with my Maxtor 160GB 8MB Cache. I actually have two of these identical drives connected to the controller card, both as master on separate IDE chains, and I'm not impressed with the copying speed between the two drives. I'm certain it is the controller at fault as the drives do not have this lag when connected to the mainboard IDE chains. I'm using the mainboard chains for optical drives though, as the Promise 133TX2 is not meant for CD-ROM or CD-RW drives. Another problem I noticed is that I have to disable "Pass Windows flush-drive-cache commands to disk drive" under the Device Manager, otherwise things like MP3's skip. With this turned off, the drive's performance decreases, but I'd rather that than have skips in my MP3's. It's simply intolerable! I do have a Promise 100TX2 that I hear is better than the 133TX2. Why haven't I installed the 100TX2? Laziness. I hope when I install that, both disk drives can return to peak performance and still have the flush-drive-cache option enabled.

For your predicament, wicked1, if you have narrowed down that it isn't the controller card, did you narrow down other hardware like the IDE cables? I assume you are using 80-wire ATA 100/133 cables and not 40-wire ATA 33 ones.

[Dartman]

If your gettng those kind of surges from your AC line you need to get some kind of intelligent UPS. I have a Powerware 1400 on this machine and another APC older used 1400 on the other machine in the front room plus a small one for the cable modem and the firewall/router. They both filter the AC and buck or boost as needed to protect the system plus they can keep my loaded full tower going for almost half an hour with everthing running including a 21 inch monitor. I paid 156 shipped brand new in the box for the Powerware and I paid 40, beat up very used, for the APC.
I know I stole the Powerware but I was the only one to bid on it and he had no reserve. The APC has a bad fan but otherwise runs fine and doesn't overheat becuase it never has much load on it anyways. It's well worth it to protect your expensive gear. E-bay and computer swaps can have these things for way less then it takes for a new one, main thing to watch is make sure the batteries are still good or figure on replacing them to make sure it's still a good deal after getting new ones.

[wicked1]

I did a fresh install of Windows 2000 pro and reformatted the hard drive its installed on and defragged once again the rest of the drives. I am now getting 35-40 meg transfer speeds according to Sisoft sandra.I was only getting 6-7 before.My 2 opticals on the Silicon Image 680 are in multiword UDMA 2 but thats not a problem as they are both burning at full speed and doing multiple compilations.4 burners on 4 ide controllers and 4 hard drives on 2 ide controllers and 2 burners on firewire 800. I am thinking about converting all my IDE devices over to firewire 800. I am still amazed how much better it does in regards to optical drives CPU usage and how many simultaneous burns I can do. The down side is that each converter is 80 dollars for 2 devices.I dont know what was causing the drives to go so slow but it was not DMA related.I think I am going to try to figure out how to use Ghost and make a backup DVD of the windows partition once I get it all installed the way I want it.
Thanks for the suggestions though.

[UALOneKPlus]

This thread has got me thinking I need to get a UPS. Losing data is a nightmare!