My Harddrive is reading/writing too slow - how do I fix it ?

[CurryKitten]

I bought a new hard drive, a 60GB UDMA100 7200rpm thingy. I got it because my existing hard drive was dropping frames when capturing DV input, so I thought this might cure it.

But it doesn't

It's reading and writing at an average of 3MB per seconds, which seems woefully slow, and it exactly what my old drive did.

DV (AFAIK) requires something like 4.2MB read/write per second, so at this point I am screwed.

I read lots of stuff onthe web about making sure DMA was active on the drives. After getting the latest 4in1 driver for my VIA chipset I can confirm it is.

I also got a perf tester (the name of which currently escapes me) It does show that the disk writes do go in spikes. i.e there is an immediate burst of speed in which the program reckons the disk is writing at 55MB/sec and then suddenly drops to 0, then stays there for a while before another 55MB/sec spike. Reading is more consistantly slow at 3ish M/sec with no spikes.

I notice the spikes in writing seem to coincide with 100% CPU usage, almost like the box gets hopelessly CPU bound and has to wait for the CPU to catch up before it can continue on it's IO.

I thought the whole point of using DMA is that it free'd up the CPU a bit. The system is not new by any means, but I thought would at least be up to the job of writing > 3MB/sec, it's a Intel Pentium III 800Mz, with 256MB RAM, and a VIA chipset.

Someone please tell me this can be tuned/fixed in some way... oh how I long for my friendly AIX tools like iostat and vmstat

[Super Stu]

Gonna ask this, because it sounds like a possibility. You've replaced the old hdd for this ata100 model. Did you use the existing 40 wire IDE cable, or did you replace it with an 80wire IDE cable, required for ata66 and above?

[eghamninja]

I'd suggest installing the latest VIA motherboard chipset drivers from here http://downloads.viaarena.com/driver...on4in1448v.exe

It sounds like DMA transfers are not working correctly as the data is buffering up and then causing the CPU to handle the block transfer. These drivers should solve the problem.

[Super Stu]

I read lots of stuff onthe web about making sure DMA was active on the drives. After getting the latest 4in1 driver for my VIA chipset I can confirm it is.

He's done that.

I would suggest you check that cable, the drive won't operate at anything but ata33 without it. The CPU usage is probably another thing entirely, though.

[CurryKitten]

Gonna ask this, because it sounds like a possibility. You've replaced the old hdd for this ata100 model. Did you use the existing 40 wire IDE cable, or did you replace it with an 80wire IDE cable, required for ata66 and above?

This is interesting, it's a 40 wire cable as far as I can see.... but then again the IDE interface on the board only has 40 pins, erm as does the interface on the drive ... which is slightly confusing

I guess the next question is what happens if you use a 100UDMA device on a mother board that can't do 100 ? My motherboard is almost completely unmaked, so it's difficult to check out exactly what it can handle

[Super Stu]

> ata66 is backwards compatible with ata33 interfaces. As such, using one of these new drives with an old motherboard and/or 40 wire IDE cable will force it to run ata33 only.

If I remember correctly, 80 wire IDE cables use 2 wires per wire found in 40 wire IDE cables. This might be something to do with bandwidth or error correction, but I'm not an electrician. If you can count (or estimate there to be) 40 wires on your IDE cable, it isn't an >ata66 cable.. the 80 wires are quite obvious, as each wire is quite fine.

I've no idea if it's a standard as such, but motherboards which have ata66 or greater capabilities have blue IDE sockets. Don't take that as gospel, that's just what I've found in practice.

[$h@d0w]

Not sure if it's any help but have you set your windows swapfile to a sensible value? You'll get a lot of hard drive thrashing if it's small.

Just a suggestion off the top of my head.

[Faded]

Hmmm I'm running a 5400 drive on a 600mhz 128 ram box and pinnacle studio 8 still says my drive has a safe 22meg/s write setting. So I really doubt it's your system being underpowered.

One thing is that if my system has been on a while, or is running particularly sluggish cause I haven't been maintaining it too well that number can drop a lot.

Have you tried closing down all the background programs you don't need, defragging the hard drive, pissing about with the virtual memory to get the whole system running a bit more chipper? etc etc etc.

I can't think of anything else that might be the problem, sorry

[eghamninja]

My eyes are going I think completly missed the bit about having already downloaded the VIA drivers.

Have you checked in the BIOS to see what the chipset settings are? If you are unsure what you are doing try using the option to reset values to the default settings, as something in the BIOS could be causing the problem.

Here is a guide as to what some of he BIOS options are:

http://www.arstechnica.com/guide/building/bios/bios-3.html

Using a 40wire cable on a UDMA66/100 drive would not cause any problems at all as I have done this before.

[Super Stu]

It won't cause any problems but it will cause it to run slower, which is the point I was making. Furthermore, check the jumper settings on the drive. I know you set them correctly, honest you did. But I've set the correctly in the past, only to have egg on my face later.

Incorrect jumper settings can make the drive do odd things.

[charlaph]

You can tell what ATA your motherboard is using by doing the following (I'm assuming you're using XP, but I'm sure most of the steps are the same for most versions of Windows)

From your Start Menu, open up Control Panel.
Click on the System option
On the Hardware tab, click on Device Manager
If you're not automatically doing it, choose to view Devices by Type
Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
Right click on Primary IDE channel and choose the Properties option
Click on the Advance Settings tab and take a look at what the Current Transfer Mode is sitting at.

If it's Ultra DMA Mode 5 then you're on ATA66, if it's Mode 2 or 3 (can't remember which) you're on ATA33. I think ATA100 is mode 7, but I'm only on ATA66 myself, so I can't say for certain.

I had the same problem when I upgraded my PC recently and bought a UDMA 100 Maxtor DiamondMax9 (which I got for video editing) - I had to buy an ATA66 compatible cable to fix the problem as the one I had only went up to ATA33, and my motherboard can't handle ATA100. The hard disc should be able to work at any of the speeds. The motherboard will work at whatever it's maximum is. The cable is most likely to be what's holding them both back.

Once I fitted a new ATA66 cable, the motherboard recognised it and switched mode automatically. I still had to tell Windows though - it didn't autodetect it. Even if it turns out that your motherboard can't handle ATA66 or ATA100, get a new cable anyway. Mine only cost me ?2 off Ebay.

Incidentally, using Premiere 6.5 I don't drop any frames, even when doing long (12mins) captures, even though I'm only on ATA66.

[eghamninja]

It may cause it to run slower but not that slower. the ATA specs are designed to be forward and backwards compatible.

[CurryKitten]

You can tell what ATA your motherboard is using by doing the following (I'm assuming you're using XP, but I'm sure most of the steps are the same for most versions of Windows)

From your Start Menu, open up Control Panel.
Click on the System option
On the Hardware tab, click on Device Manager
If you're not automatically doing it, choose to view Devices by Type
Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
Right click on Primary IDE channel and choose the Properties option
Click on the Advance Settings tab and take a look at what the Current Transfer Mode is sitting at.

If it's Ultra DMA Mode 5 then you're on ATA66, if it's Mode 2 or 3 (can't remember which) you're on ATA33. I think ATA100 is mode 7, but I'm only on ATA66 myself, so I can't say for certain.

Sorry, I forgot to mention the windows version, it's Win 98SE. I don't have an advanced setting tab on the primary IDE controller (nor on Secondary IDE controller or VIA bus master PCI IDE controller)

A bit of extra info here, which seems even weirder, is before I bought the new 60GB disk, I had a really old 4.5GB disk from a few PC's ago which was getting 4MB/per sec write speed... it's obviously a bit slow for video, but would do large captures (i.e 2 or 3 minutes) with no frame dropping

Should mention that I tried running with absolutely nothing on the system as well, and followed some other advice I found on a web site about setting the properties for the file systems as a "file server" for (alledgedly) better disk io.

I guess my next action is to track down a cable I know is rated to do at least ATA66.

Thanks all for the suggestions so far.

[Super Stu]

It may cause it to run slower but not that slower. the ATA specs are designed to be forward and backwards compatible.

Cheers mate, I didn't point that out in previous posts.

Check that cable and double check the jumper settings on that drive mate.

[eghamninja]

Have you checked how hot the drive is getting, as some drives perform what is known as 'Thermal Calibration' which is where they momentarily pause to recalibrate the read/write heads as the drive heats up.

If their is little free space around the top and bottom of the drive you could try moving it to another bay to see if this helps. If you cannot do this, check with the maker of the drive as they usually have utilities which can change various speed and power management settings in the drives firmware.