WD SATA Drive Issues????

[bblqj78]

since buliding my new system with the following..

MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum
AMD 64 3500 Winchester
1 GB Corsair XMS 3200
Western Digital 160Gb SATA 8Mb
9800 pro

I sem to be having some problems with things slowing up now and again. Games see to be taking long to load etc. etc. I had a few problems today that my hard drive was being very slow.
I ran HD Tach to get the speed of my HD and compare it to the Western Digital specs for the drive. I have attached the results of the test reults in the picture below. As you can see...I am getting very slow results (in red) and when comparing it to the resluts of a WD 160Gb SATA (in blue)..I am way off.

Ive tried a few things but nothing made any difference. I ran the WD diagnostic software and it reports all good....but this drive is defintely not running as it should be. It is actually slower than my other WD 120Gb IDE 8Mb drive.

As I had never set up a SATA drive before this system...did I miss anything during setup that would cause this? Is there really a problem? Anything else that I can try?

Thanks again

:t

[bblqj78]

Sorry....heres the HD Tach results

[Direct1]

In the test results, it shows your CPU usage at around 76%. You may have some spyware, trojans, etc... running in the background? I would try running the test in safe mode. If you get much better results, start doing some scannng of your PC.

Good luck! :D

[bblqj78]

OK...noticed that. I ran checks for spyware and stuff and ran it again..with the same results. For some reason...the cpu usage gets pretty high when running a couple of tests with the HD Tach program. I have also ran other HD benchs and all give the same reults,,,12-15Mb/s data....pretty low.

One thing I was sure about was drivers etc. required for SATA drives. As I wasnt running RAID...Do i need to install any drivers to make SATA work properly?

Cheers

[bblqj78]

HAHA...after three hours of investigation....its sorted!

In device manager...the drive was set on PI0 mode (whatever that is) instead of SATA. Now getting speeds of 125Mb/s....wooooooo. Major improvement! Weeks of wondering why....fixed in an instant!