Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of dnlowe
dnlowe

asked on

second hard drive slow

I have xp home p4 2.4  1 gig wd 120  I used to keep my media files on this drive but I have too many so I bought a wd 250.  the 120 has 8 meg cache and the 250 has 16.  when viewing video it stutters,  when setting up playlists or when previewing the many 1000's of songs it halts for a few seconds;  it never did these with just the 120.   the 250 is the primary slave to the 120.  
Do you think it's a bad drive or is the slave slower/unreliable than the master??

Thanks for your input.
Avatar of compfixer101
compfixer101
Flag of United States of America image

Might be a bit slower since it is a the same cable as the master

try putting it on its on cable

cf101
Post the models of both drives.  Is DMA enabled for both, and are they explicitly jumpered as master and slave?  WD drives have a different jumper setting for a Single master, versus a Master with Slave.
Avatar of r-k
r-k

"1000's of songs"

If all the songs are in the same folder that could cause a problem. Windows gets sluggish when wading through a folder with that many entries. Try moving a few songs to a folder by themselves as a test.
Avatar of dnlowe

ASKER

sorry to take so long to get back to you; i'm on a crazy schedule.
I will post the model #'s tomorrow.  I do remember The jumpers are correct for master with slave.  DMA is enabled for both.

I have moved some of the songs about half to another folder and no improvement.
There are only 400? videos/ 70 gigs but it's just the videos that have the problem of stuttering and halting during playback. almost like the harddrive has to catch up.

I think the model #'s are:   wd1200jb    wd2500jb    does that make sense?
did you defrag the drives?

cf101
Avatar of dnlowe

ASKER

I just finished copying all the files over;  should I still need to defrag?
Try it with a different cable - make sure it is one of those 80-wire ones.
Avatar of dnlowe

ASKER

I have used a number of different cables;all 80 pin.   Do you know of a program for testing hard drives?  or telling their transfer speed?  
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Callandor
Callandor
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
I would suggest putting it on a different controller than the boot (C:) drive, i.e. put it on the secondary controller. IDE transfers get sluggish is you're accessing both drives on the same controller at once. I think this is what compfixer also meant in the first message about putting it on its own cable.
Avatar of dnlowe

ASKER

My processor is only the 533 fsb////do you think that might have something to do with it.
Is the new drive formatted NTFS or FAT32? Is the old drive NTFS or FAT32? NTFS carries a little more overhead when fetching a directory listing but tweaks exist to speed it up some.
The FSB will not cause one drive to run faster than another, so that's not a factor.
Avatar of dnlowe

ASKER

Well guys, it's a bad drive;  the 250.

Thanks for all your responses, much appreciated.

Congrats to Callandor for the links to the testing programs;  the points are yours.