Solved Slow performance only on one hard disk

[dopefish]

I recently suffered a motherboard failure and, as a result, had to reinstall everything; so this is a clean, fresh Windows install. During the upgrade, I also upgraded my Windows from Win7 32-bit to Win7 64-bit, because I added more memory during the upgrade. All of my hard drives were carried over from my previous build, but the hard drive Windows was installed on was erased and a completely clean install put in its place. After the install was finished, I noticed a serious performance problem, so I downloaded HD Tune and discovered that my Windows hard drive was now reading at a paltry 5 MB/s. It's not a driver issue, because the other drives in my system are reading at a much healthier 100-120 MB/s; it's also not hardware, because when I reboot to my Linux system on one of the other hard disks, the disk in question can be read at 60 MB/s. SMART diagnostics also report that the drive is in perfect health. I'm confused as to what is going on that this one single specific hard drive would have performance problems, any idea?

Just as a reference, my hardware: AMD 970 chipset with SB950 south bridge; FX-6100 CPU; 8 GB DDR3 1600 RAM; the problematic hard drive is a Western Digital WD2000JD. I've tried all sorts of variations on the SATA driver for this chipset, but as the other hard drives show clean performance in HD Tune, I doubt it's a driver problem. But I can't come up with any other reason why this one hard drive won't work in Windows and appears to perform just fine in Linux. I have tried changing the SATA cables out, as well as changing ports, and even a full reinstall (again).

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Hello and welcome dopefish Well mate that HDD is only a 1.5Gbs speed drive which is fairly slow by todays standards mate, and I would hazard a guess at it only being 5400 rpm disk speed..

Now you can do a few things you can test it with the WD tester and test the drive with a surface test with Partition Wizard.

Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition. < handy tool for other purposes.

WD Support / Downloads / SATA & SAS / WD Blue / SE / SE16 (SATA II) or even

SeaTools | Seagate

Personally dopefish for the cost I would be putting in a new rive mate with at least a 7200rpm 3Gbs speed.

 

[dopefish]

Well, I feel a right idiot for posting this now, but I'll tell you the solution so that maybe anyone else who comes here and reads this can avoid my fate. I have a RAID array for my Linux setup, and so I had the chipset set to RAID and installed the AMD SATA RAID driver during Windows setup. This chipset also supports splitting SATA ports 5 and 6 to IDE for devices like CD-ROM drives, so on a whim, I moved by Windows hard drive onto port 5, switched it to IDE, and reinstalled. Bam, problem solved. I'm guessing it's a bug in AMD's SATA RAID driver for drives that aren't part of a RAID array or something. In any event, thanks for the suggestions, they are appreciated nonetheless.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

No problems dopefish and mate the only dumb question is the one that doesn't get asked as Brink puts it

Try this out too if you don't mind losing some of the "bling" it will make the machine perform a lot better.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11728-optimize-windows-7-a.html?filter[2]=Performance Maintenance