Sloooooow hard drive...

JackKelly

I have 3 hard drives on my pc, one with OS and the other two data. The two data disks are partitioned a few ways. When I go to transfer any amount of data, it copy's ridiculously slowly. At the mo, I'm getting 38 mins to copy a few gigs. Is this a symptom of a dodgy HD?

snappieT

No, but I can't remember off the top of my head how to fix it (and I'm not on a windows machine at the moment).

Do a search in help & support centre for "DMA" and make sure it's turned on for your discs based on the instructions in that article.

tomster

If you have only two controllers on your motherboard (most common solution in most of PC's) I would try as follows:

Plug one drive (a main drive, with OS) on the Primary Controller and set it as a Master and another hard drive as a Slave. Third drive plug into the Secondary Controller and set it as a Master (CD will be on the same controller as a Slave).

and

Check BIOS to activate Direct Memory Access (DMA) for those devices - it may be everywhere dependently what version of BIOS you have (Award, Phoenix, etc.)

and

In BIOS, in the first tab check HDD mode setting (LBA, CHS, etc.) Set it on AUTO.

and

In Device Manager open a tab Disk Drives, right click on EACH of HDD's you have and choose Properties. In "Policies" tab make sure you have "Enable write caching on the disc" marked.

and

Defragment ALL hard drives you have (takes ages but be patient)

and

Delete all files you don't need (TEMP files, manually empty "Prefetch" folder which contains a lot of rubbish "C:\Windows\Prefetch")

I hope your Baby gets better then... Good luck

Ruu_Old

I don't know if turning off Indexing will help but can't hurt. If you rarely use the Windows Search feature.

1. Open up "My Computer."
2. Right-click on your hard drive (usually "C:") or whatever one it is and choose "Properties."
3. Uncheck the box at the bottom that reads "Allow Indexing Service to..."
4. Click OK, and files will be removed from memory.

DoesNotCompute

As a last resort, you might try giving a hard disk recovery/maintenance tool a try. I found Spinrite to be amazing, although it's not freeware. :rolleyes:

Capt'n Midnight

if the slowness is caused by a failing disk you could use a SMART tool to query the drive.

spyware ?

JackKelly

It could well be spyware. When I checked it again, explorer was using 99% cpu on the task manager which is very strange as it has a 2500 barton chip. It certainly wasn't this slow a few days ago anyway so i'll run a few checks.

Ruu_Old

Have you got Service Pack 2 installed for XP?

kmb

if you have 3 ide drives then one is sharing with the cd/dvdrom.The speed is governed by the slowest transfer item which would be the dvd.Even if your hdd is classed at 133 it will run at 33 or whatever the cd/dvdrom is.

Disconect the cd/dvd and you should see a massive increase.

This is presuming all hdds are ide!!

regds kieran