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    M14x Slow second Hard drive?

    Discussion in 'Alienware 14 and M14x' started by nosammai, Jun 23, 2012.

  1. nosammai

    nosammai Newbie

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    I'm having some trouble with my second hard drive in my M14x.

    I bought an OCZ Vertex 3 120gb SSD, replaced the stock WD 500gb Scorpio Black drive with it. Then I put that drive into a caddy in place of the optical drive. Windows recognizes the drive, and I can use it, but it runs intermittently slowly. I ran benchmarks with HDTune and they came out normal with an average of ~60MB/s transfer speeds.

    However, I installed itunes onto the SSD and pointed the media directory to the HDD where I copied all of my music onto (which transferred perfectly fine). Now iTunes is going through and 'Determining Gapless Playback Information' for all of my songs, but it will go for a while, then stop, then continue and repeat that process. When it hangs, iTunes is completely unusable, any song that was playing stops, and it won't let me browse through the files on the HDD with Windows Explorer. I'm pretty sure it isn't just iTunes because when I browse through the hard drive in explorer and play a song with VLC, it will take a while to load the song, during which time I can't browse any other files on the disk.

    The drive shows up as SATA 3 Gb/s in HWiNFO. I read that the Hard Drive has to be set to SATA 1.5Gb/s mode in order to work with the Optical drive port. Is that true? If so, is there any way to do that with the stock Western Digital drive? I've seen people with similar issues in that their drives consistently run at a slower speed, or don't work at all, but I haven't seen anyone else whose drive inconsistently locks up.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    Update: I measured the amount of time of each hang and they are all exactly 1 minute. I'm watching the disk IO graphs on the Resource manager, and during each hang the blue line is at the top of the graph, and the green shaded line goes all the way down. When it is working, the blue line usually follows the green one, but slightly above. One minute also happens to be the amount of time that it takes for a full pass of the length of the graph.
     
    nosammai, Jun 23, 2012
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  2. copper7op

    copper7op Notebook Consultant

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    I had issues with my 2nd drive at first as well too. With a WD Drive, you can use software tools or a hardware jumper on the back of the drive to change it.
     
    copper7op, Jun 28, 2012
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