Slow Hard Disk on Multitask ?
 

So recently, I recently bought a 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10. And well, everytime I try to do 2 different things on it at the same time, it's slow. I mean, you'd expect a slowdown of some sort on any machine I guess, but it's more than that here.

I use this HD to store my music. The other operations I use it for are copying new music to it, encoding new music, or raring music. Well, the thing is I can't do anything without having Winamp skipping. I try to copy something, winamp skips, I winrar something, winamp skips, I have someone downloading stuff from my FTP, it skips ...

I know it's not normal because I used to do all these things without a single skip on my old HDs, which were theoritically of lesser quality.

So what's wrong? Any ideas?

Check your hardware manager and see in what kind of mode it's running in. Is it set to (Ultra) DMA? If it's in PIO mode you need to uninstall the hard drive and reboot, that should fix it.

Yaha ! It worked ! ^_^

It was in PIO eventhough I could have sworn I checked that already. Desinstalling the device and rebooting twice worked. I'm in DMA5 now and no skipping whatsoever.

Thanks Grawl! <3

You may want to check your drive too, since it's kind of weird your new drive already gives writing errors. It doesn't have to mean a thing, but make sure just in case.

It just did it again today. Went back to PIO mode. I'm gonna run that seagate tool thing now...

In case the drive has SMART support then check if the DMA error rate is high, this could indicate a bad IDE cable (or a noisy PC environment).
If that's the case get a better shielded cable or shield the one you own yourself (aluminium is great from high-frequency shielding).

SpeedFan can monitor the SMART status - also check for the reallocated sector count

I had a disk falling back to PIO before due to multiple CRC errors, but I can't see that happening with a new drive.

This page provides some useful information on drives falling back to PIO mode. Maybe you could simply send the drive back as it's basically new; better to change it now rather than find more problems down the line.

I didnt have the problem occuring again, so I've got to admit I conveniently let the issue slip aside for now ... Besides, I bought the drive in one of those Chinese shops that never take back anything so I would have to use the builder warranty and ship it to the Netherlands, Bulgaria or whatever their centers are ...

But yeah, again, didnt have the problem happen again so far ...

Depending on where you got it, you can EXCHANGE it. Usually you can' get your money back but they seemingly are always willing to exchange things in order to keep good customer relations.

Ya, I'd just RMA and get another one. Maybe even a different brand like Maxtor or something.

Well, it's not like I can give them any proof of disfunction ...

Well, depends if the SeaTools give you any result. If it says the drive is faulty you can RMA it. And possible send it straight to SeaGate too.

I tried the Seatools and all it detected was one of CD drives ... =/

Are you sure it really is a SeaGate drive and not some fake thing?

It's written Seagate on it, what else can I say ... =p

If you go check the device manager, and then the stations, is it named as SeaGate?

Not sure what you mean by "stations", but under "hard disks" I have:

. Maxtor 7Y250PO
. SR3320620A <- so yeah, no "SeaGate"