Welcome to Vista Banter. You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions, articles and access our other FREE features. By joining our free community you will have access to ask questions and reply to others posts, upload your own photos and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today! If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact support. |
|
Performance and Maintainance of Windows Vista A forum for performance and maintenance tasks in Windows Vista. (microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintainance) |
|
LinkBack | Thread Tools | Display Modes |
|
|||
Slow Reads on HD in Vista
I haven't been able to find a post that describes my problem, and it's
a strange one. I've got a problem with disk READS on one of my hard drives in Vista. It popped up seemingly out of nowhere. My system drive is on a separate hard drive and it seems unaffected. My D: drive (data drive) is where the problem lies. Folder-to-folder copies are taking about 4 minutes for a 700 MB file. On the system drive, they take about 35 seconds. Copying the file from C: to D: also is fast, so it doesn't appear to writing to D:, only reading. My Computer is set to not use icons or thumbnails. I've defragged the drive to no effect. Also did a virus scan with nothing found -- to be expected on a data drive. Any clues? |
|
|||
Slow Reads on HD in Vista
Hello Hurricane, To be safe, I would recommend that you backup that drive first and quickly in case it is dying on you. You might also run the Check Disk command "chkdsk /f /r" (no quotes), substituting that hard drive's letter, to see if it can find and fix any corruption in it. This tutorial will help show you how to if needed. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67...sk-chkdsk.html You might also check to make sure that you have "Enable advanced performance" checed for your hard drive to enable faster caching. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/59...ed-boosts.html Hope this helps, Shawn hurricane1951;881225 Wrote: I haven't been able to find a post that describes my problem, and it's a strange one. I've got a problem with disk READS on one of my hard drives in Vista. It popped up seemingly out of nowhere. My system drive is on a separate hard drive and it seems unaffected. My D: drive (data drive) is where the problem lies. Folder-to-folder copies are taking about 4 minutes for a 700 MB file. On the system drive, they take about 35 seconds. Copying the file from C: to D: also is fast, so it doesn't appear to writing to D:, only reading. My Computer is set to not use icons or thumbnails. I've defragged the drive to no effect. Also did a virus scan with nothing found -- to be expected on a data drive. Any clues? -- Brink *There are no dumb questions, just the people that do not ask them.* '*Windows 7 Forums*' (http://www.sevenforums.com/) *and* '*::Vista Forums::*' (http://www.vistax64.com) *Please post feedback to help others.* |
|
|||
Slow Reads on HD in Vista
On Nov 8, 8:52*pm, Brink wrote:
Hello Hurricane, To be safe, I would recommend that you backup that drive first and quickly in case it is dying on you. You might also run the Check Disk command "chkdsk /f /r" (no quotes), substituting that hard drive's letter, to see if it can find and fix any corruption in it. This tutorial will help show you how to if needed. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67...sk-chkdsk.html You might also check to make sure that you have "Enable advanced performance" checed for your hard drive to enable faster caching. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/59...ed-boosts.html Hope this helps, Shawn hurricane1951;881225 Wrote: I haven't been able to find a post that describes my problem, and it's a strange one. I've got a problem with disk READS on one of my hard drives in Vista. It popped up seemingly out of nowhere. My system drive is on a separate hard drive and it seems unaffected. My D: drive (data drive) is where the problem lies. Folder-to-folder copies are taking about 4 minutes for a 700 MB file. On the system drive, they take about 35 seconds. Copying the file from C: to D: also is fast, so it doesn't appear to writing to D:, only reading. My Computer is set to not use icons or thumbnails. I've defragged the drive to no effect. Also did a virus scan with nothing found -- to be expected on a data drive. Any clues? -- Brink *There are no dumb questions, just the people that do not ask them.* '*Windows 7 Forums*' (http://www.sevenforums.com/) *and* '*::Vista Forums::*' (http://www.vistax64.com) *Please post feedback to help others.*- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - I've tested sme things, found some unusual results. First, I regularly do backups, so I immediately did another one. That done, since I hadn't been mucking around in the BIOS, I'd leave that for later and concentrate on things that were relatively easy. I swapped in my XP boot drive to check if the drive showed the same slowdown on reads as under Vista. It did. I decided to replace the drive with another drive and see what the results would be. I offloaded the contents of one of my backup drives. These are drives I use for monthly backups, archiving, etc. They are in external enclosures and they see very little use. I reformatted this one and restored the contents of the backup I had just done on the other drive. I set the "new" drive next to the existing drive, swapped the cables, and powered up the machine. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Hmmm. Even though I knew that drive was good, I tried another drive, the XP boot drive I had just used for a test. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Connected the original drive back up and BIOS properly recognized the drive. I stopped testing to think that one over. BIOS is the latest from the manufacturer. I went over the BIOS settings and everything seemed kosher. Besides, this one made no sense. Unless the BIOS was somehow prevented from seeing new drives, and that was obviosly not true since I'd already swapped in the XP drive and booted from it. So I abandonded this for now to give it some more thoughts and to see if you have any. Then I received another surprise: after rebooting into Vista the drive's "slowdown" had disappeared. Too many mysteries. |
|
|||
Slow Reads on HD in Vista
Perhaps the driver or something had gotten corrupted and uninstalling and reinstalling the drive had fixed it. I'm happy to hear that it sorted itself out. Thank you for posting back your results. Shawn hurricane1951;884300 Wrote: On Nov 8, 8:52*pm, Brink wrote: Hello Hurricane, To be safe, I would recommend that you backup that drive first and quickly in case it is dying on you. You might also run the Check Disk command "chkdsk /f /r" (no quotes), substituting that hard drive's letter, to see if it can find and fix any corruption in it. This tutorial will help show you how to if needed. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67...sk-chkdsk.html You might also check to make sure that you have "Enable advanced performance" checed for your hard drive to enable faster caching. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/59...ed-boosts.html Hope this helps, Shawn hurricane1951;881225 Wrote: I haven't been able to find a post that describes my problem, and it's a strange one. Any clues? -- Brink *There are no dumb questions, just the people that do not ask them.* '*Windows 7 Forums*' ('Windows 7 Forums' (http://www.sevenforums.com/)) *and* '*::Vista Forums::*' (http://www.vistax64.com) *Please post feedback to help others.*- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - I've tested sme things, found some unusual results. First, I regularly do backups, so I immediately did another one. That done, since I hadn't been mucking around in the BIOS, I'd leave that for later and concentrate on things that were relatively easy. I swapped in my XP boot drive to check if the drive showed the same slowdown on reads as under Vista. It did. I decided to replace the drive with another drive and see what the results would be. I offloaded the contents of one of my backup drives. These are drives I use for monthly backups, archiving, etc. They are in external enclosures and they see very little use. I reformatted this one and restored the contents of the backup I had just done on the other drive. I set the "new" drive next to the existing drive, swapped the cables, and powered up the machine. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Hmmm. Even though I knew that drive was good, I tried another drive, the XP boot drive I had just used for a test. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Connected the original drive back up and BIOS properly recognized the drive. I stopped testing to think that one over. BIOS is the latest from the manufacturer. I went over the BIOS settings and everything seemed kosher. Besides, this one made no sense. Unless the BIOS was somehow prevented from seeing new drives, and that was obviosly not true since I'd already swapped in the XP drive and booted from it. So I abandonded this for now to give it some more thoughts and to see if you have any. Then I received another surprise: after rebooting into Vista the drive's "slowdown" had disappeared. Too many mysteries. -- Brink *There are no dumb questions, just the people that do not ask them.* '*Windows 7 Forums*' (http://www.sevenforums.com/) *and* '*::Vista Forums::*' (http://www.vistax64.com) *Please post feedback to help others.* |
|
|||
Slow Reads on HD in Vista
It wouldn't be the first time that unplugging/replugging cables fixed a
problem. While you did a great deal more, that was end result. Also it is possible that the drive was installed too well (to tight screwing it in can warp the drive enclosure). I used to do a lot of field repair of computers and the mechanical problems were always the weirdest. (If the drive is having problems it may not be able to do high speed DMA (direct memory access) operations and may revert to PIO (parallel i/o) which is much slower. Only applies to IDE (large flat cable) drives). Michael wrote in message ... On Nov 8, 8:52 pm, Brink wrote: Hello Hurricane, To be safe, I would recommend that you backup that drive first and quickly in case it is dying on you. You might also run the Check Disk command "chkdsk /f /r" (no quotes), substituting that hard drive's letter, to see if it can find and fix any corruption in it. This tutorial will help show you how to if needed. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67...sk-chkdsk.html You might also check to make sure that you have "Enable advanced performance" checed for your hard drive to enable faster caching. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/59...ed-boosts.html Hope this helps, Shawn hurricane1951;881225 Wrote: I haven't been able to find a post that describes my problem, and it's a strange one. I've got a problem with disk READS on one of my hard drives in Vista. It popped up seemingly out of nowhere. My system drive is on a separate hard drive and it seems unaffected. My D: drive (data drive) is where the problem lies. Folder-to-folder copies are taking about 4 minutes for a 700 MB file. On the system drive, they take about 35 seconds. Copying the file from C: to D: also is fast, so it doesn't appear to writing to D:, only reading. My Computer is set to not use icons or thumbnails. I've defragged the drive to no effect. Also did a virus scan with nothing found -- to be expected on a data drive. Any clues? -- Brink *There are no dumb questions, just the people that do not ask them.* '*Windows 7 Forums*' (http://www.sevenforums.com/) *and* '*::Vista Forums::*' (http://www.vistax64.com) *Please post feedback to help others.*- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - I've tested sme things, found some unusual results. First, I regularly do backups, so I immediately did another one. That done, since I hadn't been mucking around in the BIOS, I'd leave that for later and concentrate on things that were relatively easy. I swapped in my XP boot drive to check if the drive showed the same slowdown on reads as under Vista. It did. I decided to replace the drive with another drive and see what the results would be. I offloaded the contents of one of my backup drives. These are drives I use for monthly backups, archiving, etc. They are in external enclosures and they see very little use. I reformatted this one and restored the contents of the backup I had just done on the other drive. I set the "new" drive next to the existing drive, swapped the cables, and powered up the machine. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Hmmm. Even though I knew that drive was good, I tried another drive, the XP boot drive I had just used for a test. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Connected the original drive back up and BIOS properly recognized the drive. I stopped testing to think that one over. BIOS is the latest from the manufacturer. I went over the BIOS settings and everything seemed kosher. Besides, this one made no sense. Unless the BIOS was somehow prevented from seeing new drives, and that was obviosly not true since I'd already swapped in the XP drive and booted from it. So I abandonded this for now to give it some more thoughts and to see if you have any. Then I received another surprise: after rebooting into Vista the drive's "slowdown" had disappeared. Too many mysteries. |
|
|||
Slow Reads on HD in Vista
On Nov 12, 8:16*pm, "Michael Walraven"
wrote: It wouldn't be the first time that unplugging/replugging cables fixed a problem. While you did a great deal more, that was end result. Also it is possible that the drive was installed too well (to tight screwing it in can warp the drive enclosure). I used to do a lot of field repair of computers and the mechanical problems were always the weirdest. (If the drive is having problems it may not be able to do high speed DMA (direct memory access) operations and may revert to PIO (parallel i/o) which is much slower. Only applies to IDE (large flat cable) drives). Michael wrote in message ... On Nov 8, 8:52 pm, Brink wrote: Hello Hurricane, To be safe, I would recommend that you backup that drive first and quickly in case it is dying on you. You might also run the Check Disk command "chkdsk /f /r" (no quotes), substituting that hard drive's letter, to see if it can find and fix any corruption in it. This tutorial will help show you how to if needed. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67...sk-chkdsk.html You might also check to make sure that you have "Enable advanced performance" checed for your hard drive to enable faster caching. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/59...ed-boosts.html Hope this helps, Shawn hurricane1951;881225 Wrote: I haven't been able to find a post that describes my problem, and it's a strange one. I've got a problem with disk READS on one of my hard drives in Vista.. It popped up seemingly out of nowhere. My system drive is on a separate hard drive and it seems unaffected. My D: drive (data drive) is where the problem lies. Folder-to-folder copies are taking about 4 minutes for a 700 MB file.. On the system drive, they take about 35 seconds. Copying the file from C: to D: also is fast, so it doesn't appear to writing to D:, only reading. My Computer is set to not use icons or thumbnails. I've defragged the drive to no effect. Also did a virus scan with nothing found -- to be expected on a data drive. Any clues? -- Brink *There are no dumb questions, just the people that do not ask them.* '*Windows 7 Forums*' (http://www.sevenforums.com/) *and* '*::Vista Forums::*' (http://www.vistax64.com) *Please post feedback to help others.*- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - I've tested sme things, found some unusual results. First, I regularly do backups, so I immediately did another one. That done, since I hadn't been mucking around in the BIOS, I'd leave that for later and concentrate on things that were relatively easy. I swapped in my XP boot drive to check if the drive showed the same slowdown on reads as under Vista. It did. I decided to replace the drive with another drive and see what the results would be. I offloaded the contents of one of my backup drives. These are drives I use for monthly backups, archiving, etc. They are in external enclosures and they see very little use. I reformatted this one and restored the contents of the backup I had just done on the other drive. I set the "new" drive next to the existing drive, swapped the cables, and powered up the machine. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Hmmm. Even though I knew that drive was good, I tried another drive, the XP boot drive I had just used for a test. BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Connected the original drive back up and BIOS properly recognized the drive. I stopped testing to think that one over. BIOS is the latest from the manufacturer. I went over the BIOS settings and everything seemed kosher. Besides, this one made no sense. Unless the BIOS was somehow prevented from seeing new drives, and that was obviosly not true since I'd already swapped in the XP drive and booted from it. So I abandonded this for now to give it some more thoughts and to see if you have any. Then I received another surprise: after rebooting into Vista the drive's "slowdown" had disappeared. Too many mysteries.- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Problem has returned but I think I also found the cause (and the cure). When rebooting the BIOS now failed to identify the D: drive. Uh-oh. So I went back inside, reseating cables as a hope against hope, but deep down I knew the drive was dead. But its SATA cable -- a new one fresh from a sealed bag -- didn't seem to be seated fully on the motherboard. I KNOW I seated all these cables before. I removed the connector, but when I tried to reseat it the connector just wouldn't seat. It just didn't seem to want to hold its position. So out came another SATA cable in its place. It seated fine. And now everything seems to work tip-top. Even to the point of the BIOS recognizing a new drive. So I have cautious optimism. And I violated a rule I learned a long time ago: never assume the replacement is good. I learned that lesson working on cars. And it also reminded me of what happened to a colleague way back when. He was rebuilding his system with a new MB. When he got done it wouldn't work. So he went over it and over it and over it. The problem turned out to be a defective JUMPER. When I heard that, I knew that I would be going around for days trying to fix a problems like that. A jumper? Who would ever question a jumper? So, thanks for all the help. It got me thinking straight when I was starting to get a little to frustrated. |
|
|||
Slow Reads on HD in Vista
Hurricane, I'm happy to hear that it seems that you have sorted the problem out. Shawn hurricane1951;886687 Wrote: Problem has returned but I think I also found the cause (and the cure). When rebooting the BIOS now failed to identify the D: drive. Uh-oh. So I went back inside, reseating cables as a hope against hope, but deep down I knew the drive was dead. But its SATA cable -- a new one fresh from a sealed bag -- didn't seem to be seated fully on the motherboard. I KNOW I seated all these cables before. I removed the connector, but when I tried to reseat it the connector just wouldn't seat. It just didn't seem to want to hold its position. So out came another SATA cable in its place. It seated fine. And now everything seems to work tip-top. Even to the point of the BIOS recognizing a new drive. So I have cautious optimism. And I violated a rule I learned a long time ago: never assume the replacement is good. I learned that lesson working on cars. And it also reminded me of what happened to a colleague way back when. He was rebuilding his system with a new MB. When he got done it wouldn't work. So he went over it and over it and over it. The problem turned out to be a defective JUMPER. When I heard that, I knew that I would be going around for days trying to fix a problems like that. A jumper? Who would ever question a jumper? So, thanks for all the help. It got me thinking straight when I was starting to get a little to frustrated. -- Brink *There are no dumb questions, just the people that do not ask them.* '*Windows 7 Forums*' (http://www.sevenforums.com/) *and* '*::Vista Forums::*' (http://www.vistax64.com) *Please post feedback to help others.* |