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8979
November 13th, 2011 09:00
xps400 raid 1 array very slow
xps400/9150
RAID 1 array with (2) WD2500JS (Caviar) drives.
win xp media center sp3
About a month ago the computer started slowing down, with periods of the computer locking up with the drive light on. This problem has been getting steadily worse, and now the computer locks up for minutes at a time, especially if I have multiple programs running.
I had only about 15% free space on the drive, which resulted in no restore points being saved earlier than just a couple of days, so restoring the computer to an earlier state was impossible. I freed up a lot of space, and now have more than 33% free. I tried to defragment the drives, but this was very, very slow, and most defragmenting programs would hang. Chkdsk shows no disk errors. The disk diagnostic available by hitting F12 on boot shows no errors. The Intel Storage Manager software cannot diagnose RAID array drives. I did a disk performance test and the copy transfer rates are as low as 1.0mb/s and less! The primary IDE channel is set to Ultra DMA Mode 2 (shouldn't it be higher?).
What tests can I perform to see if one of the drives is failing, or if the RAID controller is failing, or some other component is failing? Every test I can find to run shows no errors, just degraded performance sometimes.
osprey4
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34.2K Posts
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November 14th, 2011 16:00
Remove one hard drive. Try running on the other one.
osprey4
4 Operator
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34.2K Posts
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November 13th, 2011 14:00
Hi BSA441,
Since you have RAID 1, you should be able to remove one drive and see how the system functions with the other.
Your IDE primary I assume to be an optical drive so UDMA 2 is normal.
BSA441
5 Posts
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November 14th, 2011 07:00
I misunderstood the functions of the IDE controllers. It's the HD's that are so slow. All test I've been able to perform show no disk problems, but file transfer rates are ~1 mb/s. Yertle the Turtle is faster. Could something on the motherboard be slowly dying?
BSA441
5 Posts
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November 14th, 2011 07:00
Also, the computer will sit quietly with the HD light on, apparently doing nothing. Once in a while there will be the standard HD rapid shuffling noise, then quiet again. Could the drives be ok, but some kind of control issue?
BSA441
5 Posts
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November 15th, 2011 06:00
I removed the drive in Port 1 and it seems to be working just fine. I do have one more question: It was my understanding that Raid 1 allowed boot from either Port 0 or 1 drive. However, when I unplugged the Port 0 drive the computer wouldn't boot from the Port 1 drive, but the computer would boot if the Port 1 drive was unplugged. If the Port 1 drive was bad (which it appears to be), how come I didn't receive an error message on boot that it was bad when both drives were plugged in?
jackshack
6.4K Posts
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November 15th, 2011 12:00
I would check the SATA controller and boot order. When used with a single hard drive, SATA 0 is the only port that the BIOS is programmed to search for boot code. When the computer is set to RAID On and you have a bootable array, the boot order normally has the array set as number 1. I believe the alternate setting on your SATA controller is RAID Autodetect/ATA. In this setting, if the controller detects the RAID parametric data on the drives they are treated as an array, but if you are having trouble with the drives the controller defaults back to an ATA setting in which only SATA 0 is used for booting.
Another point; if the computer is set to RAID On you will get a drive status message immediately after the Dell logo disappears that indicates the health of the hard drives. It should read "Normal" for both hard drives. If it does, the hardware is probably not the problem.