My new old HD slows Vista to a crawl

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:00:02 Z

I bought a new HP desktop about two weeks back. It came with a 640g hard drive but I needed my 500g from the old computer as well. Both are Western Digital SATA 3G 7200 rpm drives. The computer seems to run fine, until I start using the 500 drive. It will work fine for about 30 minutes, then everything will either come to a crawl, or just freeze. The only thing I have found to cure the freeze is to close explorer, and start it up again. After I do that, the drive (and most other things) is pretty much useless until I restart the computer. I’ve even tried to move everything from the 500 to the 640 while I try and trouble shoot, but even that is impossible.

And just a though, the 600 (the Windows installed drive) drive is plugged into SATA1 on the MB, DVD drive on SATA2, and 500 on SATA3. Any chance that makes a difference?

Side question: While I try and trouble shoot this, is disabling the drive through the device manager just as good as physically disconnecting the SATA and power from the drive so that Windows will not see it? Thus preventing it from mucking up the whole operation.

CPU: 2.2GHz AMD Phenom™ X4
RAM: 6GB PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM
Graphic: NVIDIA GeForce 9100
HDD: Western Digital 640GB SATA 3G 7200 rpm
HDD: Western Digital 500GB SATA 3G 7200 rpm
MB: Pegatron M2N78-LA
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit

My new old HD slows Vista to a crawl

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:25:39 Z

Hi supertoy,

Thanks for posting to answers.microsoft.com

Many Western Digital drives have firmware updates that get applied to the drives themselves that addresses the drive from spinning too fast for the system to perform a read/write function. You may check with Western Digital's website or your hardware vendor's website to see if any of your drives need a firmware update.

Note:

Using Third Party Software, including hardware drivers can cause serious problems that may prevent your computer from booting properly. Microsoft cannot guarantee that any problems resulting from the use of Third Party Software can be solved. Using Third Party Software is at your own risk.

You also might run a hardware diagnostics on that drive to verify whether the drive is having issues.

One important part to remember is to get a good backup of the drive before doing troubleshooting.

Try a chkdsk on the drive to verify if there are integrity issues.

Right click on the drive from Windows Explorer and select the Tools tab - select Chkdsk.

Please keep us advised involving this of the status of the issue.

Regards,

Debbie
Microsoft Answers Support Engineer
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My new old HD slows Vista to a crawl

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:25:45 Z

My firmware was fine. What I did was this: I moved the 500 back to my XP machine and trasferred all of it's data to an extearal drive I have. Then put the 500 back in the Vista machine and reformatted. Also ran ChkDsk. Everything has been working fine since.