HDD speed isssues

I've had 2 hd in my box for some time now. I've noticed that when transferring files from one to another things start out fine but speed slowly degrades until I get down to like 60MB/s or sometimes less but not much. Now I've added a third drive to the mix. The issue is now pronounced to the point that the 3rd drive is all but useless. First I thought that maybe I didn't have enough power so I applied power externally and tried again. (I did this by using my interface power. I have a gadget many of you have I'm sure that allows me to apply power to an internal drive outside of a pc and sets up a data link via usb.) I used the power supply to give power but left the drive plugged into the mother board. It made no difference. Speed starts at ~100MB/s but rapidly falls until it gets to 5MB/s or less. This makes the drive all but useless. It will take hours to move 1GB from one drive to another. I just need to use this drive as additional storage space. I guess I could just pull it out and plug it into usb and see if the speed is better but it will never get 100MB/s on usb. I do have an esata plug. Will that work or does it take a special line? I've actually never looked at it. In the mean time the other drives are still working fine. Thoughts? I've got 5 sata plugs on this board by the way. 1 is being used by my dvd player/burner and 3 by the HD's.

I couldn't stumped everybody could I? I'm going to pull the drive and see what happens usb wise. I've also go another computer I can try it in. I was hoping for some answers here. You guys are always better than guessing.

I had a new hard drive do something similar to me a while back. Called the manufacturer, they RMA'd it. New drive was problem free. It's pretty common for transfer speed to start higher and then droop a bit, particularly under Windows and the way it reports it. I'd say 60 MB/s is "normal" or at least not unexpected. 5 MB/s however, as you've already guessed, is entirely inadequate.

Contact the manufacturer, it might just be a defective unit.

JeremyCT said:

I had a new hard drive do something similar to me a while back. Called the manufacturer, they RMA'd it. New drive was problem free. It's pretty common for transfer speed to start higher and then droop a bit, particularly under Windows and the way it reports it. I'd say 60 MB/s is "normal" or at least not unexpected. 5 MB/s however, as you've already guessed, is entirely inadequate.

Contact the manufacturer, it might just be a defective unit.

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The drive was a salvage out of an old box my daughter was scrapping. She bought a new PC because the one she was using shut down regularly without warning. I took it because a look inside the thing showed an inch of dust on the heat sink for the cpu. So much so I don't know that the fan could turn at all. I figured heat was the culprit. As it turns out the HD could read and send just fine. Writing was a different story. I got info off the drive at expected speeds but writing to it was pathetically slow. I tried another old drive and it worked fine. So the extra storage I was hoping for went into the trash compactor.

Rigit said:

The drive was a salvage out of an old box my daughter was scrapping. She bought a new PC because the one she was using shut down regularly without warning. I took it because a look inside the thing showed an inch of dust on the heat sink for the cpu. So much so I don't know that the fan could turn at all. I figured heat was the culprit. As it turns out the HD could read and send just fine. Writing was a different story. I got info off the drive at expected speeds but writing to it was pathetically slow. I tried another old drive and it worked fine. So the extra storage I was hoping for went into the trash compactor.

Click to expand...

The drive could have had bad sectors from unexpected shut downs, or a lot of corrupt data. it would try and reallocte the sectors during operation, so you would experience very slow read and write times until it repaired the bad spots. It is possible that chkdsk or other HD software could have repaired the drive.

It could also just be old or fragmented. What hard drives do you have, exactly? Did you format the drive before you put it in your system?

Grab HDTune (download link) and run this for each drive. Take screenshots and post them here.