Hard disk low performance

[Tsuby]

Hi everybody!

I've got a problem that's really puzzling me.

This is my system configuration:

MOBO: A7V266-E Asus
CPU: Athlon 1.333 Ghz
RAM: 512 Mb ddr Pc2100
HD1: Quantum Fireball 20Gb (1999)
HD2: Maxtor 80Gb (September 2002)
Video: Marvel G400 Tv
Audio: Muse Gamesurround Dvd 5.1
Cd-writer: Samsung 40x
Dvd player: Pioneer 10x
OS: Win2000 Pro SP3

The problem is only with my maxtor 80Gb drive. I use it for my captures, but since I upgraded to win2k... the best transfer rate I can get is: 2.29Mb/s
I cannot use it at all.

I did not update from win98. I formatted my disk, converted to ntfs and made a clean install of win2k on the Quantum disk.
I also formatted the Maxtor and converted it to ntfs.

The two hard disks were on the same ide channel under win98, I switched the Maxtor as master on the second ide channel after the problem with win2k arose.

Now the ide channels are like this

1) Quantum master, cd-writer slave
2) Maxtor master, dvd player slave (both udma).

Udma is enabled on both channels. The drive is fully recognized. I changed the ide cables. Now I am using ata-133 rounded cables (well shielded).

I have tried reinstalling win2k, I have tried forcing the latest via drivers. I have tested both hard disks with the Powermax utility and I have reformatted the 80Gb drive with MaxBlast II by Maxtor.

Everything seems to be *perfectly* in order, but I cannot aquire a single frame at a decent resolution.

I'm really at wits'end with this.

What am I doing wrong???

Thanks in advance for the help.

Erika

[Paddy]

Are you sure DMA is enabled on the controller? It is in a different place in Device Manager than in Win98.

What are you capturing from?
How does the drive behave normally?

It sounds like a software/config problem.

[Tsuby]

Hi!

Thanks for the help

Are you sure DMA is enabled on the controller? It is in a different place in Device Manager than in Win98.

Yes, I checked in the right place
Dma is enabled on both controllers (system says data transfer is udma)

What are you capturing from? How does the drive behave normally?

I have been trying to capture from my Tv-tuner using Avi_Io and the matrox pc-vcr.

The drive behaves normally, no data loss, everything is fine, apart from the fact that I keep dropping frames when I try capturing full res.
If I lower the resolution or use my other drive (even the small partitions at the end of the disk!) no drops at all.

I am sure it has to be a software problem, but I can't understand WHAT it is.

I made a new benchmark with Sandra (I attach it), everything seems ok, apart from something about the size of the clusters (which I do not know how to change).

Any ideas?

=========================================
Sisoft Sandra Report
=========================================

General Drive Information
Drive Class : Fixed
Total Space : 74.6GB
Free Space : 74.5GB, 100%

Volume Information
Volume Name : MISUGI
File System : NTFS

Volume Properties
Maximum Filename Length : 255 chars
Volume is Compressed : No
Volume is Read-Only : No
Case Sensitive Names : Yes
Preserves Filename Case : Yes
Unicode Filenames : Yes
Access Control Lists : Yes
Named Streams : Yes
Object Identifiers : Yes
Reparse Points : Yes
Sparse Files : Yes
User Disk Quotas : Yes
Folder/File Compression : Yes
Folder/File Encryption : Yes

Logical Drive
Sectors Per Cluster : 8
Bytes Per Sector : 512
Cluster Size : 4kB
Total Clusters : 19543064
Total Free Clusters : 19540119

Disk Cache

Physical Disk
Cylinders : 9732
Heads : 255
Sectors Per Track : 63
Bytes Per Sector : 512

Drive Statistics
File(s) : 4
Folder(s) : 7
Space Used : 24kB
Space Allocated : 40kB (40% Slack)

Performance Tips
Warning W1808 : Large cluster sizes waste disk space. Break drive into smaller partitions or use NTFS.
Tip T2 : For more information about tips, press F1 and scroll to the Tips section.

[Marshmallowman]

do you have win2k sp2 or sp3 installed? , helps perfomance.
and the latest via 4 in 1 should help

[RhinoZ]

Hey,
I had the same problem last year but my mobo is the A7V and I only have a 900MHz cpu. But anyways I had to change around some cards in the slots and put the hard drives on the same channel, and on the the ATA 100 channel (whoops, big goof whoever built my system, and me a goof for never checking ) I also updated the bios to ver 11, Via drivers 4.28 ( which worked better than 4.33 for me ) and v1.60 build 33 for the promise driver. I went from a 1.9Mbps to around 12->15Mps.
I found these resources on the web, where I got all the info and related drivers.

http://www.a7vtroubleshooting.com/

http://www.amdmb.com/faq-display.php?FAQ=4

Good luck.

[RhinoZ]

Oh I also forgot to mention I use win200K with sp2. There is a general saying with these folks here that if it ain't broke don't F*** with it.
So I never upgraded to sp3, some people had posted problems and stuff about them.

[Marshmallowman]

sp3 is no biggy, sp2 is something you defintely want.

all I can think of is try putting the 80G on a channel of its own to see if it improves thing

[Tsuby]

Hi everybody and thanks for your help!

I have tried a few more thingies, but no results:

SP3 is already installed and so are the latest via drivers.

I moved the 80Gb disk back to Ide 1 as slave. I guess that being coupled with an old udma 4 disk is still better than with an udma 2 dvd player. I benchmarked again and the transfer is still as low as before.

I also looked around on the via site and tried to install the via miniport driver... according to the specifics it might have been what I needed. I rebooted after the install and it took about 25min to get into win2k.

There was a new "via idetool" program installed. I checked and all my disks and cds were recognized correctly.

I wanted to benchmark, but I was immediately asked to add a driver for a Via bus master ide controller and to reboot again. Did that and my 80Gb drive had become a SCSI driver. It was correctly identified but not accessible. The two ide controllers could no longer be located in the device manager. I only had the Bus Via Master Ide Controller. I uninstalled everything and rebooted.

BSOD. I had to format and start anew (good thing that I had a fresh image of the drive )

The Via bus master ide controller was still in the device manager together with the other 2 standard ide controllers. Is that normal? I don't remember seeing it in the old Win98 device manager, but I might be wrong.

Maybe I should just have updated from win98... but I wanted the ntfs disk.... I don't really know.

If I don't solve this issue quickly I'll have to bring my computer to a technician, since I really need the 80Gb.

And if I ever can be sure that the fault is hardware, to get my drive replaced (it's still under warranty) I need to prove to the people in the shop that the problem I have is not a software one.
I still think it's software, however

Thanks again

Erika

[LvR]

Some Maxtor disks shipped with "write verification" set to on - its supposed to revert to off after a few power cycles ...............perhaps yours is stuck in on?

There is a util on the Maxtor site to check this and a few other settings like "acoustic management" etc.

Have you tried that?

[Tsuby]

Problem solved

Hi everybody and thanks for your help.

I finally solved the problem by... replacing the 80Gb disk.

I took out the disk to throw it against the wall and I saw that one small ide pin was broken.

I don't know how it happened. I installed the disk 6 months ago and never touched it again until last week. It seems that this connector was not used by Win98, so the performance was ok.

I don't remember doing anything that could have broken the pin, but... who knows. Maybe it was defective from the beginning.

Obviously, scandisk and the other programs would find no errors, because the disk was actually ok.

Now I can capture using yuy2 and huffyuv at 20Mb/s ^_^

I hope I'll get the disk replaced, the vendor says this is not the first time something like this happened.

Well... I'm happy that things are ok now!

Thanks for your help and support!

Erika