hard drives slooooooow

[Strogg]

Here's my problem: i've got 2 160 gig seagates and a maxtor ultra16 300 gig ide drive. the seagates are raid0 on an intel 865 controller. now this is what happened:

i used ot run windows on the raid setup, until i got the 300 gig, then i decided to cross over to the 300gig. i did that (yay), but after a few weeks, i've started to have hard drive transfer problems. right now, when i want to transfer something from one hard drive to to the other, it will start full speed, then about 100-200 megs into it, it just stops for about a minute, then starts again. during that minute, i can't make any i/o's to any of the two hard drives i'm transferring data to (that includes both the raid array and the 300 gig and a portable hard drive i have connected to usb2). and when i mean i can't make any i/o's, i mean it. explorer just halts except for alt-tab. ie stopps working, gaim kinda sits there, and the only thing that works is my music software which caches the songs to ram.

so... any ideas?

winxp pro sp2
abit is7
p4 2.8@3.5
1 gig of ram
geforce 6800gt
and blah

oh, and btw, i don't have a problem burning stuff, but i'm pretty sure that's due to it being slow in the first place.

[Steven4563]

download HD Tune 2.10 and see if the health of the drives are ok if they are maybe try different motherboard drivers ?

[marc1]

You may be running too many things too fast the cpu may be too hot and cant operate properly or you may have some corupt files or a bugg in the drive.
My opinion on this reinstall everything and start backing up.You v got to prepare to burn the drive to the core.

[Strogg]

well, i'm running the diagnostic now. one thing that came up, though: it's not hard drive - hard drive transfer, but it's actually accessing more than one drive at a time. because while my raid array was being checked, i had a hard time installing a game patch on my 300 gig.

anywho, raid0 turned up clean, and 300gig is clean so far. it can't be the cpu since it's not operating at anything higher than 40C. i have no more than 30 processes running at a time (which includes all of my programs i launched). so... yeah. any other ideas? thanks

[Strogg]

addendum: 300gig is perfectly clean. the benchmark test yielded some odd results, though. with the raid0, everything is relatively smooth all the way across with the random access test looking very linear. whereas the 300 gig goes from 60mb/s to 30mb/s with several 10-20mb/s dips along the way, and tons of outliers in the random access test (some yellow dots are even off the graph!). the mean random access time is aroun 15.9ms... which really worries me.