My work laptop Compaq NC6220 has been very slugish. Back in october the hard drive started going very slow, so I requested a replacement. They put a refurbished seagate 40 gb drive in there. A month ago, it started going slow again and it seemed the hard drive had trouble reading data as the hd noise was consistent and not random. I went ahead and picked up a brand new 120gb western digital, ghosted it and put it in. It was flying for about two weeks and now its going slow again. Attached is the output from HDTune. Speed capped at 1.8mb?!??!? Not going to get started on the cpu usage.
I'm going to try my drive in a coworker's laptop tomorrow. Has anyone seen an HD Tune pattern like this before?
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Attached Files:
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Have you checked that the primary IDE channel is not set to PIO mode in Device Manager?
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Yeah, definitely check its not in PIO mode. I had my laptop's DVD drive spontaneously decide to switch down to PIO mode and performance went down the tubes. Hard drive would be much worse.
Grand Admiral -
Excellent. Just checked it and it was indeed in PIO mode. Deleted the primary controller and restarted. Speedy ever since.
Decided to apply the fixes suggested here to make sure that this performance is permanent:
http://neodon.blogspot.com/2006/07/little-known-tweak-to-boost-hard-drive.html
Just came across a microsoft kb article outlining the same steps
KB817472
Bad hard disk controller?
Discussion in 'HP' started by unrealii, Mar 4, 2008.