[ryan4sc]

I have a Dell Dimension 4550 I bought a couple of years ago. I use it for video editing and other tasks.

I put in a 110 GB internal drive (master) and a 200 GB secondary drive. I was starting to run out of space and also having problems with my slave drive.

All of the data on that slave drive is there, but the drive appears to work very slow. Copying files there is very slow and also if I try to play the raw .avi files I capture from my camera (any size) they play very chopping in all types of players. It is as if the data is not getting to the processor fast enough.

So I bought a new Segate 300 GB Ultra ATA/100 7200 RPM drive. 16 MB cache and 3.5 inch drive.

I was going to try and add it to my existing two drives but I don't think my motherboard can support it. It didn't have another IDE port I could use.

So I just swapped out the 200 GB drive that was acting slow for the new drive. The problem is the new drive was acting the SAME WAY as the old one, slow to copy files and .avi files play very choppy and slow when I open them. I also used a brand new cable for the install like the manual suggested.

Two questions:

1) Can I in fact install an 3rd internal drive somehow? Or are systems like this usually limited to two?

2) More importantly, what could be wrong that a brand new drive would be acting the same way as my old drive?

I am sorry if these are dumb questions or if I didn't provide enough info. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Hey Ryan4sc,

Welcome to Geeks To Go!

1) Most computers only have the cables and power supply for two. If you wanted you could get two 500GB HDD and get a terrorbyte. But there isn't a way to get three HDD in there.

[Jazza]

Hey Ryan4sc,

Welcome to Geeks To Go!

1) Most computers only have the cables and power supply for two. If you wanted you could get two 500GB HDD and get a terrorbyte. But there isn't a way to get three HDD in there.

[ryan4sc]

I downloaded PC Wizard and ran the hard disk benchmark.

On my old 120 GB drive my Seq Write number was 35 MB/s with 7 % CPU usage. On the new 300 GB drive it was 12 MB/s and 98% CPU.

Other numbers were along those lines, I can give them to you if you want.

But the new drive has a HUGE CPU usage and slower benchmark numbers.

Computer is like 2-3 years old. XP Home version 2002 SP2
Pentium R 4 CPU 2.53 GHz
1 GB RAM

[BungaBoy]

Ryan,

You should be able to add the 3rd HDD by using the second plug on the IDE cable that connects to your CD/DVD drive. Be sure to make the HDD slave drive if the CD/DVD is master or vis-a-versa. I'd be surprised if there isn't an extra power cable to plug into the HDD. If there isn't get a "Y" splitter cable.

How often do you defrag your HDDs? This should be done on a regular basis.

Good luck.

[ryan4sc]

OK, here is what appears to be happening. My Primary IDE channel has two devices. The Master (0) has Ultra DMA Mode 5. The Slave (1) has PIO, which apparently is making things super slow on my secondary hard drive.

I have seen several articles on this behavior but so far I can't fix it. Here is what I tried:

- Toggle from "DMA if available" to "PIO only" and back.

- Removing drivers and rebooting. Then when it finds the hardware I would reboot again when it promts me to.

- Trying to update the registry with this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0002
ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess new DWORD value of 1
(from this microsoft article: http://support.micro....com/kb/817472)

- Deleting the SlaveIdDataChecksum from the registry.

None of these worked. Each time I would pull up the Device Manager and still see PIO mode for that hard drive.

I am not sure how to update the driver for these if that is even an option. Searching on the intel and MS websites didn't turn out much I could figure out. Right now it says the IDE channel driver is from 2001 and is version 5.1.2600.2180 from microsoft.

Any ideas? Again, I do have XP with SP2 installed.