I have three SATA drives in my system (two WD and one Seagate). The two WD's are Caviar models (one 250 gig and the other 320). The Seagate is a Barracuda 500 gig.
I have a dual boot system with WinXP Pro SP3 and Win7 Home Pro. Win7 is on the Seagate, WinXP is on the WD 320, and the WD 250 is being used to save data only. Over the last week or so I noticed my hard drive transfer rate seems to be dropping. I noticed it when opening a music file in a Wave Editor program to edit the file (the file is stored on the WD 250). Then I noticed when I copy large files (anything above 10 MB or so) the transfer is very slow and the computer seems to go idle like it's trying to sync up with the transfer rate or something. Also when I download a very large file off the Internet and the system saves the file once the download is complete, the save will either lock up or the computer will crash and reboot. Sometimes when the reboot occurs I notice the BIOS detection of the hard drives is faulty (the Seagate name is all B's and Z's like, "bzbzbzbzbzbzbbzbzbz". I reset and then the hard drive name is detected.
During reboots the computer also automatically runs CHKDSK and it always finds some unallocated space and recovers it. Sometimes it deletes a file or two that have the name of the file I was downloading.
I have never had problems like this before. It appears to involve the WD 250 gig drive (the oldest drive). If I am working on just one of the other drives it seems fine. It occurs in both WinXP and Win7. I tried to copy the contents from the WD 250 gig to one of the other drives and was getting a transfer rate of between 1 and 2 mb/s which I know is not good.
I checked my Primary IDE Channel controllers and they are all set to Auto Detect and using DMA if available. One of them has "Not Applicable" in the Current Transfer Mode for both devices. The others have "Ultra DMA Mode 2" and Ultra DMA Mode 5" as the transfer modes.
I'm not sure how to proceed with troubleshooting this problem or what to do about it. Can I get some help please?
Thanks
I have a dual boot system with WinXP Pro SP3 and Win7 Home Pro. Win7 is on the Seagate, WinXP is on the WD 320, and the WD 250 is being used to save data only. Over the last week or so I noticed my hard drive transfer rate seems to be dropping. I noticed it when opening a music file in a Wave Editor program to edit the file (the file is stored on the WD 250). Then I noticed when I copy large files (anything above 10 MB or so) the transfer is very slow and the computer seems to go idle like it's trying to sync up with the transfer rate or something. Also when I download a very large file off the Internet and the system saves the file once the download is complete, the save will either lock up or the computer will crash and reboot. Sometimes when the reboot occurs I notice the BIOS detection of the hard drives is faulty (the Seagate name is all B's and Z's like, "bzbzbzbzbzbzbbzbzbz". I reset and then the hard drive name is detected.
During reboots the computer also automatically runs CHKDSK and it always finds some unallocated space and recovers it. Sometimes it deletes a file or two that have the name of the file I was downloading.
I have never had problems like this before. It appears to involve the WD 250 gig drive (the oldest drive). If I am working on just one of the other drives it seems fine. It occurs in both WinXP and Win7. I tried to copy the contents from the WD 250 gig to one of the other drives and was getting a transfer rate of between 1 and 2 mb/s which I know is not good.
I checked my Primary IDE Channel controllers and they are all set to Auto Detect and using DMA if available. One of them has "Not Applicable" in the Current Transfer Mode for both devices. The others have "Ultra DMA Mode 2" and Ultra DMA Mode 5" as the transfer modes.
I'm not sure how to proceed with troubleshooting this problem or what to do about it. Can I get some help please?
Thanks
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