E510 with s l o w SATA

Question

My daughter brought home her E510 this Christmas break. I was getting all of her S/W updated and everything felt very sluggish. I ran PCMARK05 and her HDD score had dropped to 758 instead of being in the 4000s. She has a pair of 160 Gb Dell SATA drives. I have defragmented her drives, but that did not matter. The drives appear to be working, just super slow. The rest of the computer, CPU, graphics, memory benches out just fine. Any recommendations? David

klbf · Answer

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lambdapro · Answer

More benches would not have helped.  I knew that the computer felt slow and the hdd was measured at 1/6 of the original speed. But I did just fix it today.  I went in to the device manager and uninstalled the Southbridge.  Rebooted.  Let it find new devices.  Rebooted.  Works great now. David

oracleminded · Answer

Obtained from Intel's web site....   SATA Controller Not Running at 150MB per Second Intel® Desktop Utilities may report that Serial ATA drives are running at ATA speeds (ATA/100 or ATA/133).  This is because the Serial ATA controller is running in Emulating Parallel ATA mode and is using Windows parallel ATA drivers (i.e. atapi.sys). While the Serial ATA controller may be operating at a higher transfer speed, it may claim to be operating in a slower parallel ATA transfer mode. All versions of Windows prior to Windows Server* 2003 have support for Emulating Parallel ATA mode. For additional information refer to Serial ATA in the Microsoft Operating System Environment. †   I know Dell did not have an answer for me regarding this discovery

ralphhipps · Answer

which chip is the southbridge, the 82801 or the 954G?

oracleminded · Answer

954...I am hoping that the Vista support of NCA will fix this problem.....but Dell never should have shipped it.

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