Hello I've got a Dimension 4600 that's out of warranty. It has 2 hard drives, the boot drive came with the computer and I intalled the second around 2 1/2 years ago.

Recently when I try to access files on the second drive the machine slows down and sometimes hangs.

In the event viewer are the following errors

atapi -Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.                                    disk  -An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.
atapi -The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0
atapi  -The driver has detected that device \Device\Ide\IdePort0 has old or out-of-date firmware. Reduced performance may result.

I ran Sigguardian to test the SMART monitoring and everything seemed ok. All the numbers were over the threshold values and no warning of imminent failure of either drive was given.

I ran the Dell diagnostics by booting to the utility partition and tested the hard drives. It stopped giving 2 errors

Code 0F00 0447 IDE device failed - Timeout waiting for DSC to be asserted
Code 0F00 1A48 Block 39301669 - Target drive aborted command - This result was produced by the confidence test.

So doesn anyone know what this probably means. Is the disc bad or is a deeper problem.

I ran the express Dell diagnostic and the processor/memory etc passed it just became very slow on the second hard drive confidence test so I aborted.

Both drives are connected using the same IDE cable with the jumpers in both set to direct connect.

Thanks.

Thanks