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    W520 Slow READ from Ultrabay??

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by plympton, Jul 28, 2011.

  1. plympton

    plympton Notebook Guru

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    I'm making a new thread for this, since it's so bizarre for me.

    I have a W520 Q2720, 12 GB ram, and 2.6 BIOS. It runs great, except 1 weird problem - the Ultrabay drive READS at 7 MB / sec. I can write to it at 100MB/sec from a USB 3.0 drive, but READING is painfully slow.

    W.T.H?

    So, W520 (RAID enabled BIOS, RAID disabled), Q2720, 12GB Ram, Vertex 2 90 in the main drive, 320 7200rpm in ultrabay (OEM RAID drive, RAID disabled & reformatted), 1 TB on USB 3.0. All drivers up to date, Windows 7 64 Pro.

    Copy functions:
    3GB from USB -> Ultrabay: 100MB/sec
    3GB from Ultrabay -> USB: 7MB/sec
    3GB from USB -> USB (copy to itself): 45MB/sec
    3GB from Ultrabay -> Ultrabay (copy to itself): 5MB/sec

    EDIT: HD Tune bears this out - SSD: 130+MB/sec, USB 3.0: 100+ MB/sec, Ultrabay: 7MB/sec

    Anyone know how to even debug this? It's driving me crazy!

    Thanks!
    -Dan
     
    plympton, Jul 28, 2011
    #1
  2. talin

    talin Notebook Prophet

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    Where did you get your ultrabay adapter? Ebay?
     
    talin, Jul 28, 2011
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  3. pkincy

    pkincy Notebook Evangelist

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    Using the Lenovo Ultrabay Adapter III (the one for SATA III) I actually get faster benchmarks on my drives than in the drive 0 slot.

    Perry
     
    pkincy, Jul 28, 2011
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  4. plympton

    plympton Notebook Guru

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    Nope, it came with my RAID W520 (2 7200 RPM 320GB drives).

    I found the answer - it appears that since I didn't tell the Intel controller that the drive was no longer a RAID drive (I have an SSD and the HD for storage), it thought I still had a degraded RAID mirror, and was probably waiting to rebuild it.

    Strange. The drive was even formatted in Windows and everything.

    Anyway, after re-enabling RAID (instead of AHCI) in the BIOS, and using the Intel RAID BIOS functions to make the drive non-RAID (saying it would erase it, but it didn't), it now reads at full speed.

    Anyway, one for the archives....

    -Dan
     
    plympton, Jul 28, 2011
    #4