Andreas Blaafladt » Hardware http://andreasblaafladt.com Random thoughts on studying and computer science Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:29:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Does your hard disc drive (hdd) appear to be slower than before? http://andreasblaafladt.com/2007/03/13/does-your-hard-disc-drive-hdd-appear-slower-than-it-used-to/ http://andreasblaafladt.com/2007/03/13/does-your-hard-disc-drive-hdd-appear-slower-than-it-used-to/#comments Tue, 13 Mar 2007 01:05:00 +0000 andreas http://andreasblaafladt.com/2007/03/13/does-your-hard-disc-drive-hdd-appear-slower-than-it-used-to/ Mine did, anyway. I have a ThinkPad R52 which I have been running with the same installation of Windows XP from the day I got it, approximately 19 months ago. Recently I’ve noticed that disk operations were slow and required huge amounts of cpu cycles (mainly kernel mode) causing excessive delay in my interactive programs. This appeared a lot like DMA issues we experienced in the MS DOS-days.

The Windows Device manager reported that my hdd was in fact not in UDMA-5 mode but PIO. Several attempts at switching back to DMA proved worthless. Hacking Windows Registry or debugging possibly faulty hardware isn’t exactly my idea of fun, so I was very pleased when a random search on Google directed me to this thread at www.techimo.com. Long story short, a new version of a SATA Power management driver for Windows 2000/XP provided by Lenovo magically resolved the issue. The problem is listed in the driver’s changelog under version 1.2 “(Fix) Solves a hard drive being slow due to change the transfer mode from UDMA-5 to PIO. (This will resume to the UDMA-5 mode at installation time)”

What caused the switch from UDMA-5 to PIO initially is nothing I care to find out about, but I guess it can be traced back to a particular Microsoft Windows Update. Since I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary in the configuration of my laptop, I suspect a lot of other ThinkPad owners share my experience.

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