Raptor SATA disk spinning at 5400rpm instead of 10,000rpm

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geek4me

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#57176 4-Feb-2010 20:12

I have a Western Digital System Disk WD360GD-00FNA0 WD 36.7GB (SATA150, 8MB Cache) on my XP Professional PC with SP3 that is running at only 5400rpm instead of 10,000rpm.

Diagnosis was using SiSoftware Sandra Lite 2010c. Running "Benchmark - Physical Disks" the "Performance vs Speed" tab page chart consistently returns a Drive speed for my Raptor disk of only 5400rpm and a Read speed of just below 3MB/sec.

My second SATA gaming drive returns normal expected values.

The system takes 5 mins or more to start up and all system disk IO is slow. What would cause the Sata disk to run so slowely and how can I get it back to 10,000rpm?

The disk is 75% full and has recently been defragmented including all unmovable files so this is not the cause. The event log does not show any obvious disk errors. The disk drive uses standard Microsoft drivers. I have not been able to find any WDC drivers for it.

Any help and advice would be appreciated.

bonuscup

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#296235 4-Feb-2010 22:22

3 MB/s read speed makes me think that Xp has dropped your drive right back to PIO mode instead of using DMA.

Have a quick read through http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx for some more info about how to check, and some reasons why it might have happened.

geek4me

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#296317 5-Feb-2010 09:28

Thanks bonuscup will check this out when I get home today. Does PIO mode also affect the rpm speed?

geek4me

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#296488 5-Feb-2010 18:36

Many many thanks bonuscup, you hit the nail on the head! My Read rate is now 37.4MB/sec instead of less than 3MB/sec, more than 10 times faster.

I had to uninstall the devices and after a reboot it all came right!

I had in the past installed a split cable to power my two disks from the one power supply connector when I installed the new second drive and this caused lots of disk errors. I had never had this problem before so I powered each disk separately and the disk errors stopped but so did the performance speed!

I have put up with the PC starting slow and running poorly for months and was about to buy a new PC.

I really appreciate your help. There is another PC at work that had disk cable trouble and is also going slow - I will try the same solution for that.

SiSoftware Sandra Lite 2010c still thinks it's a 5400rpm disk so that's a bug in that diagnosis program. It does show the more than 10 fold increase in Read speed.

I thought PIO was a TV entertainer - on a PC it means your disk is running slow!