Need help with slow hdd

[lovingHDTV]

I've noticed recently that my system is very slow. I downloaded and ran the HD Tach software to test my HDD performance.

Avg. Read speed is 4.7mbps, that is slower that a 10mb ethernet!

I checked under system properties and I have DMA if exist selected, but current mode is set to PIO. I know that DMA is faster with less CPU overhead, but that much? How do I see if the drive can run in DMA mode? I bought the computer in 2000.

thanks,
dave

[gplasky]

Alot faster. Mucho faster. Of course it depends if your drive is ATA33-or-66-or-100. Go into the bios to make sure your drive is being seen properly and the setting there should be set to either auto or dma. Also make sure you're using the right cable if it is ATA100. There sould be 80 wires in the ATA100 cable. Older cables only had 40.

Gerry

[lovingHDTV]

I checked my bios. The drive is set to auto detect and shows dma mode 4 as a valid mode. I have dma if available set in XP, but it is stuck in PIO mode.

I ran all the WD disk diagnostics on the drive and it did not find any problems.

Any other ideas on how to get XP to recognize and use the DMA mode?

I saw something in the BIOS to reset the PCI bus so that the PNP operating system would reassign pci resources. Would this help?
thanks,

[lovingHDTV]

Poking around on the MS support webpage I found that XP will reduce the transfer speed of a HDD if it gets CRC errors. After enough CRC errors (could be caused by bad wire, slow startup time out of suspend mode, etc) it will set the drive to PIO mode only. They say to reset the device you have to uninstall the driver, reboot and have the driver re-installed upon rebooting. See quote below:

My hdd that I'm having problems with is my boot drive. If I un-install the driver for this drive will it even boot back up?


WORKAROUND
To re-enable the typical, or faster, transfer mode for an affected device:
1. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then click Computer Management.
2. Click System Tools, and then click Device Manager.
3. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers node.
4. Double-click the controller for which you want to restore the typical DMA transfer mode.
5. Click the Driver tab.
6. Click Uninstall.
7. When the process completes, restart your computer. When Windows restarts, the hard disk controller is re-enumerated and the transfer mode is reset to the default value for each device that is connected to the controller.

[lovingHDTV]

Update:
This worked fine for my CD burner, but I was afraid to try it on my boot disk.

Instead I located the registry settings that control this feature, and reset them to match the settings for the secondary driver (udma mode4 also). This worked great and I'm back up and running.