Hi all,

After 2 years of bliss, I had a hard drive crash on my TR3AP2.

Sent it to Sony Repair in San Diego…  One day I get an email saying a part was backordered. The very next day the laptop is FEDEXed back to me, much to my surprise.

Unfortunately, the replacement hard drive performs *much* worse than the original HDD. I literally cannot do two things at once with this “new” drive.

If I am playing iTunes and try to surf the web, the audio becomes really choppy. I have to stop performing other tasks if I want to listen to audio or watch video. It also is now really hard to multitask.

The machine is performing so poorly since Sony repaired it, I’m really aggravated. According to Sony, the “new” drive passed all Quality checks.

Any suggestions, y’all?

p.s.
This forum is great. Found threads on how to fix my formerly-sticky keyboard (no thanks to Sony’s support site)!

It sounds like the hard drive is operating in PIO mode instead of DMA mode. To check, go to your Control Panels -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management.

Look inside there for Device Manager for IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers.

Under the properties look at Primary IDE Channel. For Device 0, make the Transfer Mode is set to DMA if available. And double check under it to make sure it says something like Ultra DMA Mode 5. If it’s not then change it. In fact, you may as well check the Secondary IDE Channel for the same thing.

PIO mode basically means that for any type of data transfers, the system must ask the CPU to handle and manage the whole process. Since Windows XP uses a lot disk transfers for everything (even if you have lots of memory), it thrashes the hard disk and bogs down the CPU since it has to handle every single request. DMA mode allows devices to intelligently transfer data directly to system memory with little CPU intervention.

So, try that and see how things go.

Hi Groovyone,

is that a typical setup that you’ve wrote above?
would you recommend to do the same on any pc?

regards,

KZ2030.

[quote author=“KZ2030”]Hi Groovyone,

is that a typical setup that you’ve wrote above?
would you recommend to do the same on any pc?

regards,

KZ2030.

Yes. There is absolutely no reason for you to be running in PIO mode unless you’re masochistic and enjoy slow computing. The only reason you might be running PIO mode is if you have an older ATA/ATAPI device. For instance, some older (really old) IDE hard disks run in PIO mode. That’s not common though. However, a lot of older optical devices (CD-ROM, CD-R) run in PIO mode which was fine back in the 2x/4x days. With 52x CD-ROMs and 16x DVDs, the ATA bus gets saturated and takes a beating from all of the data being thrown at it.

You should also make sure that your computer’s BIOS is set to run ATA/ATAPI devices in DMA or UltraDMA mode. Most modern systems are set to do this automatically but it never hurts to check.

Lastly, don’t forget that you should make sure you separate your devices according to their abilities. For IDE ATA/ATAPI devices, the slowest device on your device chain dictates the entire speed for that chain. So, if you have an UltraDMA 2 CD burner on the same chain as your UltraDMA 5 hard disk then you hard disk will run at UltraDMA 2 (i.e. max transfer of 33MB/s) which can lead to decreased performance since most modern drives can burst close to the 100MB/s ATA 5 limit.

Hi,

Thanks for the feeback!

It looks like my Device 0 Primary IDE says “Transfer Mode” is DMA if available, however the “Current Transfer Mode” is staying in PIO Mode.

The Secondary IDE is on DMA if Available and Current Transfer Mode is ULTRA DMA Mode 2.

I tried F2 to look at the BIOS Settings, but cannot get to the menu selection for the settings you mentioned.

Any thoughts?

I had experienced that problem with one of my dvd writers running in PIO. Everytime I did a data transfer using that drive my computer would almost stop responding and cpu usage would be almost at max. I think I fixed it by uninstalling the culprit IDE channel and then rebooting and allowing windows to once again detect the channel. But that was for a optical drive, I don’t know how safe it would be doing that for the harddrive, so better wait for groovy’s advice.

Yeah, it seems like it could be a driver problem.

However, try one thing real quick. Go to the Device Manager and under Disk Drives, check on the properties for your hard disk. Under the Policies tab, make sure you hard disk is set for Performance and make sure the box below says Write Caching enabled. If everything looks ok here then move on to the next step. If not, change the settings and reboot.

So, you’ll want to boot into SAFE MODE by hitting F5 before Windows starts booting.

Once you’re in SAFE MODE, navigate yourself back to the Device Manager. Under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, right click on the main Intel Ultra ATA Controller and choose to uninstall it. The two channels should automatically go away as well…if they don’t then manually uninstall them as well.

Reboot Windows.

When Windows XP comes back up it will likely say new hardware found and start churning away. It may ask you to reboot since new hardware was found. Even if it doesn’t ask you, reboot once more just in case.

Once you’re up again, go back to the device manager and check the DMA settings. Hopefully, everything is fine…if not let us know and we’ll try some other stuff.

Wow!

That uninstall drivers worked like a charm!! I’m on the board listening to iTunes!  Cannot thank you enough!!

If you have a fav watering hole in MDR gr00vy0ne, let me know neighbor! First (and second) round’s on me!

Cheers!