Question : Problem: Slave Drive is VERY Slow

I installed a new slave drive in my friend's PC and it is running VERY slow. Duplicate a large file on the master and it takes say 10 seconds. Copy the same file to the slave and it takes a couple minutes. I have done the following to diagnose the problem with no change at all:
- The drive self test reports no errors
- Confirmed the drivers are current, both from the setup CD and from Windows Update
- Changed jumpers from Cable Select to specifying the drives as Master and Slave
- Swapped out the original interface cable for the one supplied with the drive
- Jumpered the drive so it is small, 32GB, to eliminate the >137GB issue
   (the Seagate large drives have a special jumper for this)

I have my doubts the drive would be bad out of the box, especially when it passes the self-test.

Computer: Dell PC, 2.35 GHz
OS: Windows XP Home, SP1
Master drive: Seagate 60 GB
Slave drive: Seagate 250 GB ST3250623A
Other drives: DVD reader, DVD burner, floppy

It is interesting that when copying a large file, initially it copies very quickly then slows way down, and if the file is modest size (< about 19 MB?) there is no problem. It may be coincidence, but the dive has a 16MB buffer and the problem only seems to show up on files that are larger than that. However, I assume that a drive buffer is a read cache that would not aid writes, so the cache size is probably a red herring.

To complicate matters, this PC has had "issues" for years as my friend installed several P2P file sharing programs (Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus and LimeWire) and other programs that I believe caused instability and conflict problems.

I do have one more idea -- to try and eliminate the computer as a source of the problem I plan to install an old Western Digital 20GB drive as a slave and see if it has the same problem, but I won't see my friend until next Friday, Feb 2nd, and that will be the last opportunity to return the drive to the place of purchase under their 30 day return policy.


Q1) Any ideas what could be causing this speed problem?

Q2) When I install my old Western Digital 20GB drive, do I need to install any drivers or should I be able to use whatever has been running the existing Seagate drives?


Thank you in advance,
parkerea

Answer : Problem: Slave Drive is VERY Slow

The other thing I suggest is to make sure you have the most up to date drivers for your hard drive and for the drivers for you sata bus on your motherboard.

Also, what's the spec's for your computer? ie. namely how much memory
If you have only a minimum amount of memory and you're transferring large data files, I've seen the problem you're having occur.