Hard drive slowness Got a hard drive question. Yanked out a third older W.D. 21600 hard drive from closet yesterday. It got jumpered OK, then connected it in to the main board via a cable and the four wire power supply. Set the BIOs, and it is recognized right off as a slave drive. I like to use these as a backup for holding numerous older Autocad files of about 5K each. Situation being is that it flat takes forever to do anything to that drive. It takes like 1-2 hours to run a simple SCANDISK on it and about same for a Defrag. Much-much too long of a time. In DEFRAG it looks like it takes a group of ten blocks, from one area, then transfers them, and wait ten seconds, it shows up then repeat. No wonder it takes so long at ten per 1/4 minute. Is something wrong here? Wholely wrong drive type (it used to work fast and fine a year ago). Maybe something wrong with main C:/ drive or Win 98 settings, or in the Bios set-up. Wm.

Lots of things you may have running can make Scandisk or Defrag re-start many times in normal mode, resulting in them taking a lot longer to finish. If you run them in Safe mode instead, they will probably take the minimum amount of time to complete. ........ I have my Win 98SE swap file set up to have sole use of a 500mb partition on the same hard drive Windows is on. That results in the partition Windows is on getting fragmented a lot slower, and the partition the swap file is on never needs to be Defragged. Previously I had it set up to have sole use of a 200mb partition on the same hard drive Windows is on - that works fine too, except when I have opened a lot of digital camera files at the same time I get messages about the swap file not being big enough. ....... If the hard drive partition Windows is on is too full, Windows will run everything slower. E.g. with my 98SE set to use the 500mb partition for the swap file, on the ~8gb partition Windows is on, 800mb of free space is the point at which Windows begins to run slower. (The hard drive and the mboard is using UDMA 66). ..... Sometimes Win 98/98SE does not enable DMA mode for the hard drive (or optical drive) automatically. Take a look in Device Manager for each hard (and optical) drive listed, under Settings - if DMA is not enabled, enable it and reboot - usually it will still be enabled when you look there again, if it is a hard drive, and the hard drive will perform better if it does stay enabled. If the hard drive is capable of UDMA 66 or greater, if the mboard is capable of UDMA 66 or greater, the drive must be connected via an 80 wire data cable to the IDE header in order for it to be able to reach it's full rated max speed. (If the mboard is not capable of UDMA 66 or greater, a 40 wire data cable is sufficient for all IDE drives, using an 80 wire cable will not allow the drive to run any faster than the mboard chipset will let it, and according to my experiments with old mboards, 430xx, 440 LX, and 440BX chipsets, even connecting the drive to a PCI EIDE controller card will not allow the hard drive to run any faster than the mboard chipset will let it.) If there are problems with the data cable it is connected to, or with the hard drive itself, Windows may force the hard drive into a slower PIO mode. It is common to un-intentionally damage IDE data cables, especially while removing them - the 80 wire ones are more likely to be damaged. What usually happens is the cable is ripped at either edge and the wires there are either damaged or severed, often right at a connector or under it's cable clamp there, where it's hard to see - if a wire is severed but it's ends are touching, the connection is intermittant, rather than being reliable. Another common thing is for the data cable to be separated from the connector contacts a bit after you have removed a cable - there should be no gap between the data cable and the connector - if there is press the cable against the connector to eliminate the gap. 80 wire data cables are also easily damaged at either edge if the cable is sharply creased at a fold in the cable. Try another data cable if in doubt. Check your hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostics. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... (thanks to Dan Penny for this link:) Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm... If you don't have a floppy drive, you can get a CD image diagnostic utility from most hard drive manufacturer's web sites, but obviously you would need to make a burned CD, preferably a CD-R for best compatibilty, on another computer if you need to.

That model is not showing on the WD site. What is the capacity of the drive? Is it 1.6GB? That is an older numbering system. I think what you have is an EIDE mode 2 drive of 1.6GB. If this is the case you may need to change the cable to an 80 wire/ 40 pin. The drive may currently be running in PIO mode. In Device Manager expand the Hard disk controllers. You should have two channels showing. They should be labeled- Primary IDE controller [dual fifo] Secondary IDE controller [dual fifo] xxx Bus Master IDE controller The xxx represents the maker of the chipset like Intel, nVidia, SIS, VIA, etc. If you don't see those three listings then you need to install the drivers for your motherboard from the motherboard manufacturer or chipset maker. For best performance the drives should be running in a DMA mode. In Device Manager expand Disk Drives and right click on the drive in question and choose properties> settings. DMA should be checked.

If the mboard has a 430xx chipset, Win 98 and 98SE have built in support for most of those those chipsets, but sometimes they do not specify the correct I/O address for the secondary IDE correctly, even if you install the proper main chipset drivers. In that case there will be a yellow ? beside the Secondary IDE listing in Device Manager, and no dual fifo listing for the secondary IDE. E.g. I know for certain that applies for the 430FX chipset, and I can tell you how to fix that.

This is probably your drive: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-dr... It's ATA-2 (ATA-33) so the cable shouldn't be a factor. You can try to match the drive's bios settings to its specs if it doesn't autodetect but I suspect it will. I think it'll turn out that drive is just much slower than what you're used to. Plus it's old and probably running slower than when it was new. Defrag will run faster if you use the windows ME version of defrag.exe.

I'd also suggest that if the drive is full of 5K files, then it will take "forever" to defrag, since you're using so much headroom for each file. In addition to DAVE's WinME's Defrag, I'd also suggest chopping the drive up in to sub-540MB partitions (if possible) or making sure it's FAT32. Less space wasted and likely less time Defragging. Just curious, why aren't you backing these up to something less risky (such as optical)? The drive may last a few weeks and drop off into the bit-bucket...

Working under a handicap now. The video adapter blew out maybe one hour after posting orignal question. Swapped in a different one and am running on it, for now, but have real difficulty in seeing what goes on then for ahs wrong driver on it. Tube... The motherboard per original brochure says uses a 440BX chipset. I cannot get to Western D. to look up older hard drive due to video now. But had way back when wanted a jumper configuration and seems they built it and types from 1996 until 1999. Mine ahs something about 1997 on it. I have checked DMA and find four free outlets, and says per resource meter I have 90% as of today. Am running on 16 bit at present time. As on occasion have to insert the same drive into a computer running DOS 6.2 to restore a few missing files there. Wm.