Two Hard Drives

PC: Dell Dimension 1100 Desktop
PROCESSOR: Intel Celeron D - 2.53 GHz-512 MB RAM
HARD DRIVES: Seagate 7200.7 (80 Gigs - Original Factory Install) & Western Digital Caviar SE 7200 (80 Gigs - Self-Installation)
rolleyes I use one of my hard drives strictly for storage (The Seagate), but when I access anything on the drive, my system suffers a slowdown until I close out of any windows from that drive. It's not a major problem, and it doesn't really cause any real problems, but just wanting some tips on how to make performance a bit better. Any help is greatly appreciated.rolleyes

 

Do you have the second drive on the same IDE channel as the primary (boot) drive? If you do, that might be causing the slowdown since the IDE controller can only talk to one drive at a time (this is the reason it is recommended to have your CD burner on a different IDE channel than the drive it is pulling data from).

Dell systems ship with the had drives set for Cable Select. If you added the second drive, and it is not set for Cable Select (even if jumpered correctly for its position on the cable), that might be the reason it is running slow (although that doesn't seem likely to me based on your description).

You also might want to check the BIOS to see if the hard drives are set to use the Quiet setting for IDE Hard Drive Acoustics Mode ('quiet' reduces performance in order to reduce noise, 'suggested' uses the drives built in acoustic defaults, and 'performance' has the drive operate normally).

Hopefully this will help you out.


Larry
Dell Customer Advocate