Hard drive, cables, controller or whats up?

Mad_Mike

For the past couple of years I have been using an old PC to run Boxee
It worked great and played all files with no problems
Also, it is plugged directly into my UPC router and I have a 100 Meg connection

Recently it started to play up, freezing while playing videos etc

Without going into tons of detail, 80% of videos are stored locally on the machine and other 10% streamed from my office PC

This pc is running XP with all updates
Its a 2.4Ghz Pentium
1GB Ram
128Mb FX5200 GPU
2 HDD (1x160GB & 1x400GB)

The 160GB is broken into C and D. XP is on C and D is storage for files (120GB). Drive E, the 400GB one is totally storage.

Anyway, after a lot of messing around, I have found that on a 100 Meg connection, my download averages about 15 (direct into LAN). My office pc (using wirless N dongle) achieves about 65/70 Meg!! So, after watching speedtest results, the graph has peaks and valleys in it. I thought at first it was a faulty network card, but I think I have now almost got to the bottom of the problem.

I ran Passmark Performance Test and most items seemed fine, until I came to my hard drives. They are running RIDICULOUSLY slow!!! It would appear this has a knock on effect with download speed etc and also with playing back files locally.

I will run the tests now again, but from memory, I am getting maybe 1 or 2MB/s rates, and on my office PC I get maybe 20 or 30MB/s!

As there are 2 drives, I find it hard to believe that both have just failed at the same time, so that leaves me wondering about IDE cable, power supply, or mobo/controller?

Anybody care to offer any insight into this please?

yoyo

Mad_Mike wrote: »

For the past couple of years I have been using an old PC to run Boxee
It worked great and played all files with no problems
Also, it is plugged directly into my UPC router and I have a 100 Meg connection

Recently it started to play up, freezing while playing videos etc

Without going into tons of detail, 80% of videos are stored locally on the machine and other 10% streamed from my office PC

This pc is running XP with all updates
Its a 2.4Ghz Pentium
1GB Ram
128Mb FX5200 GPU
2 HDD (1x160GB & 1x400GB)

The 160GB is broken into C and D. XP is on C and D is storage for files (120GB). Drive E, the 400GB one is totally storage.

Anyway, after a lot of messing around, I have found that on a 100 Meg connection, my download averages about 15 (direct into LAN). My office pc (using wirless N dongle) achieves about 65/70 Meg!! So, after watching speedtest results, the graph has peaks and valleys in it. I thought at first it was a faulty network card, but I think I have now almost got to the bottom of the problem.

I ran Passmark Performance Test and most items seemed fine, until I came to my hard drives. They are running RIDICULOUSLY slow!!! It would appear this has a knock on effect with download speed etc and also with playing back files locally.

I will run the tests now again, but from memory, I am getting maybe 1 or 2MB/s rates, and on my office PC I get maybe 20 or 30MB/s!

As there are 2 drives, I find it hard to believe that both have just failed at the same time, so that leaves me wondering about IDE cable, power supply, or mobo/controller?

Anybody care to offer any insight into this please?

A slow or failing hard disk will make any kind of productivity be a pain. My mum has an old machine with a hard disk which passed a diagnostics scan, but if downloading even a small file the disk can totally pause for near 15-20 seconds as if the machine has just totally locked up.
Most hard disks start wearing out after a few years, its just the nature of the technology

Nick

Nothingbetter2d

1gb ram sounds a lil low... chuck 1gb more and xp should run sweet

also is the c drive partition full or close to full? also try turning OFF system restore on all drives.... reboot (to clear out old restore files which eventually take up a fair sized portion of your hard drive) and turn system restore back on again and mark a restore point.

Mad_Mike

Cheers for the reply guys
I forgot about this post!
In the meantime I bought a Boxee Box on Adverts and am only using this to stream files to the Boxee Box now, but want to go for a NAS eventually, but I think I must have either a power cable or IDE cable issue as I have left it with the side cover off for a couple of days and I can hear it make a clicking noise a couple of times a day, almost like the hard drive shutting down or something. Think I will extract it from behind the tv tomorrow and have a look

I appreciate that it's old, AND that 1 GB of ram is nothing, but this is more like a fault, rather than a gradual thing and the fact there are 2 drives, both performing badly makes me wonder.

Regarding the C partition, from memory it has a good bit of room (20-30GB) remaining, but I must have a look and try that anyway