Slow WD740 Raptor on nVidia Chipset.

[mangyDOG]

I have a 74Gb Raptor drive which I have been using as the boot drive for a PC for some time now and all appeared to be normal. Recently, although boot times seem normal, transfers from the other drive in the system to the Raptor are really slow. HD-Tach tests the drive at a STR of only 9Mb/sec, the other SATA drive on the same controller tests at about 60Mb/sec. The motherboard is a nVidia 590 chipset. I tried new SATA cables with no improvement. I retested the drive on two other motherboards, the first is an older nVidia nForce4 ultra and it also tested very slow. Finally I tested it on an intel P965 chipset and I get 65Mb/s. All other drives I have tested on the nVidia boards return reasonable speeds, just the Raptor runs slow.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why, and how I can fix it?

Cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[P5-133XL]

Check to see if all the devices (or specificly the HD in question) on your primary/Secondary IDE controllers are all still transfering using UDMA.

 

[mangyDOG]

I have checked device manager and on all PCs the drive is correctly listed and the drive controller is set for optimum performance and uDMA6. I ran the WD disk tools program on one of the computers and it had everything listed OK.

I have also just noticed one other thing to test, on both nVidia PCs I used the drive on the SATA power connectors, on the Intel PC I had it connected to the molex plug. It shouldn't make a difference, but I will test it again on the nVidia PC using molex.

Cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[mangyDOG]

Running on molex changed nothing. Still some form of conflict between the Raptor and the nVidia chipset or nVidia drivers. I have tested the nVidia nForce4 Ultra motherboard with SATA and PATA drives from WD, Samsung, Hitachi and Seagate and all worked as expected, just this Raptor cracks the sads! :-(


Cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[Bozo]

Have you checked for driver/BIOS updates for your motherboard?
Did you try the test in Safe Mode?
Maybe using a different test (ATTO?) would shed some light on the problem.

Bozo :joker:

 

[MaxBurn]

I seem to remember hard drive performance problems with nvidia chipsets, thought they had cleared all that up. Might want to remove drivers, reboot, and do a driver cleaner session in safe mode. Then reinstall the latest drivers.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Uninstallers/Driver-Cleaner-Professional.shtml

I was having some problems uninstalling and updating (and backdating but I digress) drivers for my nvidia video cards. Nvidia's drivers are almost viral in their nature.