| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 108007 | 2010-03-10 12:04:00 | SLow accessing data from second physical drive | Chikara (5139) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 865785 | 2010-03-10 12:04:00 | Hi all My OS and apps are on C: drive and all my data is on D: drive, which is a separate physical drive. Both are WD, both have plenty of free space. (Oh and I also have a WD external HD attached for backups.. I usually leave this turned on and plugged in via USB, but initiate the backups manually, so it should be accessing data from there when I'm doing other stuff) Recently I noticed loading data from D drive is very slow. At first I noticed when loading Outlook (as the pst file is on D drive) and swapping email folders and opening emails was quite slow. At first I thought it was a corrupt pst file, but I've noticed often (not *all* the time, but very often it's actually any data from D drive is slow to load. For example, clicking to open a music folder (that has about 10 MP3 songs in) just took 10 seconds to load. But other times, it will load virtually immediately. I'm not sure where to start troubleshooting, any suggestions? I've run a full viruscheck (clean), and all the Windows updates are up to date, as are my drivers/BIOS as far as I can tell. I've run a scandisk. I haven't recently installed/removed anything, and it was like this before today's monthly MS patches. The only other strange thing I've noticed, is just this morning it had a message saying my version of windows was not genuine. My copy definitely is genuine, and it validated correctly when it was installed. I ignored the message and haven't seen any notices reminders since. (And right now according to Control Panel > System & Security > System is says Windows is Activated) I'm running Win 7 64bit Home Premium, i7 860, 6GB RAM, Vid Card Radeon 4890. So it should fair fly along, and it did used to...so any help on where I should start troubleshooting is much appreciated! |
Chikara (5139) | ||
| 865786 | 2010-03-10 12:16:00 | Have you tried running the manufacturers diagnostics application? |
KarameaDave (15222) | ||
| 865787 | 2010-03-10 12:43:00 | Thanks, yes I've tried that... the SMART test is fine, but when I try and run the diagnostics (on any of the drives) it always gives me a "Cable test Write sector error" before it even starts??!! It does this for all three WD drives (C: D: and the external one).. I don't know how to resolve that either, surely there can't be cable problems with all 3 drives..? |
Chikara (5139) | ||
| 865788 | 2010-03-10 17:41:00 | Change the cables and see if it makes a difference | gary67 (56) | ||
| 865789 | 2010-03-10 19:35:00 | Thanks, yes I've tried that... the SMART test is fine, but when I try and run the diagnostics (on any of the drives) it always gives me a "Cable test Write sector error" before it even starts??!! It does this for all three WD drives (C: D: and the external one).. I don't know how to resolve that either, surely there can't be cable problems with all 3 drives..? Without actually testing it, since all three are playing up AND windows saying its not genuine, I would say its either malware - OR possibly even a Motherboard failing, IF its the Board, that can throw up the not genuine message, as windows thinks the Motherboard has changed. Edited: have you tried removing the external HD, and does it make any difference |
wainuitech (129) | ||
| 865790 | 2010-03-10 19:41:00 | I also have a WD external HD attached for backups.. I usually leave this turned on and plugged in via USB I've run a full viruscheck (clean), First DO NOT leave the backup drive plugged in. One: It can die if you get a power problem in the house along with your PC. Unplug it from everything and only plug it in when actually doing your backups. Two: It can be corrupted by Windows. This happened to a friend of mine, some issue and she rebooted and WIndows said it was repairing errors on the backup drive. What it did was trash all her photos and turn the folders into files with bizarre names. Took her ages to do a retrieval on it and she still lost some of them. What antivirus did you use? And what anti-spyware scans did you do and with what? As for the cable error with the WD diagnostics - it's a common problem, there s/w ios a piece of &^%%##. Try a 3rd party tester. |
pctek (84) | ||
| 865791 | 2010-03-10 20:06:00 | Agree - dont leave it plugged in. I use an NTFS 1.5tb and everytime there is a slight glitch I have to checkdisk the drive which takes about 14hours. I think I may change it to ext2 or ext3. |
pkm (13527) | ||
| 865792 | 2010-03-10 20:32:00 | Are the internal drives IDE or SATA? I'm assuming SATA from the build of your system. Have you tried connecting the drive to different ports on the motherboard? Swapping the cables around? Trying different cables? How about plugging the [slow] drive into another computer? | Aurealis_ (7897) | ||
| 865793 | 2010-03-10 21:00:00 | Whats the brand / model of the mobo? | Speedy Gonzales (78) | ||
| 865794 | 2010-03-10 21:07:00 | ...I think I may change it to ext2 or ext3. All that will do is require extra drivers, and swap chkdsk for fsck (unless you're only running Linux - in which case, why on earth were you using NTFS anyway). Ext3 is just the journalled version of ext2, and both take forever to check if you don't unmount them nicely. You can mitigate this to some extent with the ext3 journal, but only up to a point - and you'll pay for it big-time performance wise. |
Erayd (23) | ||
| 1 2 | |||||