Hi,I have been experiencing very sluggish operation lately. I thought I had a western digital hdd and since I have their diagnostic utility I was going to run it. I now discover that I have a Standard Disk Drives model ST360015A. I tried to google for the mfr to get their diagnostic but I could not find the company. Is there any other that will work? Maybe my wdlg? Or can someone recommend one? Also, if I end up replacing this one will most brands work, and how do I tell how large I can go? Thanks Bluejay

Sluggish operation is normally not caused by a hard drive problem. The usual cause is an infection by virus, trojan or some other bad software.

Chkdsk /r will do a pretty good job of checking your drive for problems. It takes a long time.

Hi, I have done all of the scans and run a hjt log and haven't found anything out of the ordinary,(been posting in xp forum).For more details. When I mean sluggish, I mean for example if you click your mouse,(sometimes) it takes 4or5 seconds before you hear the click and an action occours or requires multiple clicks. As I posted in xp forum the only oddity is when I click start it tells me that there are too many items to show im my start list when there actually only 3or4 and explorer useage seems rather high. Tried system restore to no avail, so I figured I would test the drive. Right now I am unloading everything important to flash drive and taking it to my other computer for safe keeping. Bluejay

ST360015A is a Seagate Drive. Use the Seagate diagnostic.

Stuart

Hi Stuart, Wonder why the manufacturer is listed as Standard Disk Drives. I am heading to segates website right away. As for the other questions, will any manufacturers dive work in my machine? And how do I determine how large of drive my system will handle? Thanks Bluejay

You can use the Seagate diagnostic to check the Hdd, but it would seem that you may only need to clean up. I use CCleaner, Spyware Terminator and disable unwanted start up items. This will help free up your system.

BTW: More Ram

"As for the other questions, will any manufacturers dive work in my machine? And how do I determine how large of drive my system will handle?"

Those questions probably don't need to be answered, because running the diagnostic will most likely show that your hard drive is ok.

But anyway, hard drives are pretty standard and any drive should work. Since you have a P4 system, it should handle any size drive on the market.

It's more likely that your system has become corrupted.

Check to see if DMA is enabled. Go Device Manager> IDE/ATA/ATAPI controller> Primary> right click and select properties> Advance settings. The box should tell you if the cureent mode is DMA. For SATA drives select the Serial ATA controller> properties> primary channel> speed test. Post back with results.

As to why it shows as a Standard Disk Drive--any info about the drive is read by the bios from the drive's firmware. Typically that will include the model # and ATA specs. I don't think the manufacturer is included although some diagnostic software will supply that info based on the model number. Sometimes a chipset update or accelerator software will give a better description of the drive.

SIW should give you more info on all your hardware and software.

http://www.download3k.com/Antivirus...

Hi, I see what you mean DAVE. The machine I am at here at home has 2 40gb western digitals internally and a 250gb western external, and they show the correct model and Standard Disk Drives as the manufacturer. Beckrl, the start message I spoke of was when you click the windows start in the lower left corner of the task bar,to access programs, not startup items. I have eliminated all but a couple and still get the message sometimes but not always. I have a feeling that this started at the same time I started having the other problems.(looking for something in common) As far as drive size, I seem to remember a post in xp forum recently and something about 128gb. I will dig deeper when I get to work tomorrow. Thanks for now. Bluejay

OtheHill, I got as far as current mode is ultra dma 5 in your suggestion but can't find anything else you wrote after that. I see nothing about speed test etc. Bluejay

If your drive is running ultra DMA 5 it is a IDE/ATA drive and the speed test is only applicable to SATA type drives.

Your drive is running as it should. Look elsewhere for the system slowness.

Most likely you have too many processes running with too little RAM. Look at running processes (ctrl+alt+del) and post how many are running. Number is at the bottom. Some items are system intensive. For instance, active AV scanning.

Other areas to look would be things like system swap file, CPU cache. There is a program called SANDRA. It has a number of benchmarks you can run that give comparisions to similiar systems. There are many versions out there. Latest versions are for purchase but somewhat older ones can be found that will perform these benchmarks.

Get SANDRA here: http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.h...

Hi, Sorry I am slow at getting back but my business is very busy this time of year and it is hard for me to even check back. First of all this problem occured rather suddenly which makes me suspicious. I have run spybot, adaware, NAV, and HJT and compared it to a log ran a few months ago with no abnormalities. I have 38 processes running right now with just this window and task manager open. Cpu usage is 2% and page file is 257mb. I had mentioned before that when things got bogged down that exolorer.exe runs very high nearly 100%. I keep taskmanager open all the time so I can monitor it. Until I can get everything important moved from this machine I am going to hold off on a hdd test just in case. I will get back as soon as I can. Bluejay

bluejay, gave you a bad link to SIW. Use the one below.

http://www.download25.com/install/s...

Then you may have Gaobot.AdW Worm
Google for removal software or update your Anitvirus.