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Another bad hard drive?

matts5074matts5074 Member Posts: 148
Sheesh. It seems I have nothing but bad luck this year with hard drives. The suspect this time is a 40GB Maxtor 5400RPM. It's a little over 2 and 1/2 years old.

I use it for video editing and DVD backups. It's main use is recording off my capture card so I can watch the shows later on my DVD player. Well, tonight I went to burn a 1 hour long show I'd previously recoreded and it wouldn't begin the lead-in. At first I thought it was bad media. But after a couple restarts the drive is slow reading/writing anything. I did manage to get it virus scan all drives and it came up clean.

Copying a 4GB file takes upwards of 130 minutes. Obvioiusly, that's extremly slow and way to slow to keep up with the DVD burner.

In my past experience a drive will make noises, not show up in BIOS, ect when it's about to give up the ghost. This one detects just fine in the BIOS and shows up in explorer, just the transfer rates are all of a sudden horrible. I haven't installed any new hardware either. When I'm copying alot of files I get a *small* amount of noise feedback through the speakers, but the cable is shared with a CD-ROM drive which functions normal.

Any ideas?

I'm going to run PowerMax on it tomorrow and see if it comes up bad. Usually it doesn't though until it's too late.

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    matts5074matts5074 Member Posts: 148
    A little more info...

    I discovered via device manager that despite the fact it's set to "DMA if available" it changed it's self to PIO mode. It's usually UDMA Mode 5.

    I checked the BIOS to make sure UDMA was enabled, it is. Rebooted and now it's showing UDMA Mode 5 as it has in the past, but it's still extremely slow. icon_cry.gif
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