Weird hard drive behavior

I have three ide drives in my XP system and one of them is acting weird. It takes a very long time to delete or copy files from it, I would say at least 4x as long as the other two drives. This is a fairly new symptom, it worked fine before and I have not changed the configuration at all. Yet I run my HD tach utility and the read speed is pretty much where I expect it to be. No other errors or failure to read or write. I've seen many symptoms of impending doom on hard drives before but never this. Has anybody else seen this?

have ya defraged it?have ya made sure it didnt refert back to p10 transfer mode?

How do I check to see if it's reverted back to a P10 transfer (I don't know what that is). I can try defragging it, it can't hurt but these symptoms seen to come up all of a sudden although I can't seem to pinpoint exactly one.

Raggie, that was the quickest post to any thread I have ever started. I just checked my email, didn't get any, came back to cpf and there was a reply.

i stink at explaing stuff and im about to crash been up for like 25 hours but its under device manager and ide usaly.hopefully some one who is beter at expaling em selfs will tell ya how to check if it went back to p10 mode i doubt it didnt but they have done that before

It's PIO (programmed input/output), not P10. Back when things were generally slow, and bus traces and transistors were at a real premium (OK, bus traces still are, but they're running at 1GHz+), it was a none-too-speedy way to transfer data to and from IDE drives, but is inferior to DMA (direct memory access), except as a compatibility hack. In PIO, the CPU does the bulk of the work in transferring data, and is limited in speed (the fastest PIO I think is about 16MB/s). With DMA, the CPU says, "move this here," and then moves on to other things while the transfer happens.

Right-click My Computer->properties->System->Device Manager
Under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, check both IDE channels' Advanced Properties. If any that are enabled are not set to, "DMA if available," and do not read "Ultra DMA Mode" or "Not Applicable" then there may be a problem. First, though, make sure they are set to DMA if available (if you have to change the setting, you'l need to reboot).

Still doing bad? I'd get the diagnostic tools for your drive (such as Seatools for a Seagate), and run a test or two (usually there's a short and a long). If that comes up clean, defrag. If it doesn't, stop the test (assuming it does not stop on an error), and back up your data immediately (back up first, worry about what to do after that later). Diags before defrag! If it's a hardware problem, you don't want to be stressing the drive as it quietly dies on you!

I had something maybe similar. Rar files (and come to think of it, large file moving) would take a hour or so to unpack. Taskmanager gave me weird information but process explorer indicated an issue with hardware interrupts.

Access that suspect drive's SMART data.
It'll show if the drive is failing in any parameters.
Speedfan 4.31 works well at this.

Also check your cables, BIOS, and if the drive has Indexing Service activated.
This option usually slows down HDDs in a system.

You mentioned 3 HDDs, this one wouldn't happen to share a cable with an optical drive? If so, DVD and CD drives are only UDMA-2. And any faster drive sharing that port will have to step down to the slowest device in the chain.

If your drives are all SATA, the above won't apply.