Hard Drive question.

[DEFkon]

I decided that i was running out of space the other day and picked up an additional internal HD. (300GB Barracudea ata).

I've got everything formated and installed ect. but the damn thing is very slow. Initially i had both drives set to Cable select mode (as suggested in the dell manual that shipped with the pc) , and the new drive was very slow, but i figured it was because it was so large and i only gave it one partition... anyhow the other day a friend loaned me an external 300GB hd USB, and the damn thing was like 100X faster than my internal one. lol. which got me to thinking maybe the drive is bad or setup wrong? I tried going and setting the jumpers to Master/Slave - which did produce a minor improvement when trying to browser folders, but there's still no way to actually run media from the drive (music, video) without it stuttering and speeding up slowing down ect ect. The files themselves seem to be ok, because when i move them to the primary they play fine.

am i doing something wrong, missing something, or is the drive crap?

 

[Crowze]

Ideally you should have the hard disks on separate IDE channels. That being said, it should still be at least as good as any USB disk. Check your IDE controllers in the device manager and make sure they are all set to 'Use DMA if available'.

 

[Hadmar]

Sounds like it runs in PIO mode instead of Ultra DMA. In device manager open the properties of the IDE channel you connected the drive to. You can see the mode in one of the tabs. If it's not running in UDMA mode check your BIOS settings.

*edit*
Insta damn it

 

[Keganator]

You also might want to check to make sure the correct drivers are installed for your hard drive controller.

 

[LifesBane(4Corners)]

If all else fails, run a scan with DFT and see what it comes up with.

(Above link is for a bootable CD... bootable floppy version can be found here)

DFT (Drive Fitness Test) is Hitachi's HD scanning utility. Works great, but it can take a while for a full scan on a large drive. Try the quick-test first, and if it passes, run the full test.

 

[DEFkon]

Massive thanks guys, it's like someone just droped a new shiny HD on me. All this time i thought it was just cause the drives were on the same port or something i had to live with.

For the record. The 2nd HD (on the primary IDE) was stuck in PIO mode. I updated the bios, uninstalled/reinstalled the drivers, and was going to start pulling what little hair i have left out. In the end what did the job was settings in the bios ( the dell ones are somewhat childish ) and i took a stab at setting the Primary IDE slave to "auto" from "off".. it's like night an day.. UDMA 5 baby. weeee!