my problem is probably quite unusual but i need to ask if someone has an idea of how fixing it ..
Recently i have added a 500GB SATA Seagate harddrive on my old AsRock P4i65g motherboard with P4 2.8ghz (i already had a 500gb sata Samsung and a 80GB IBM system disk).
I have reinstalled XP SP2 on the new Seagate and since then, my computer seems quite slow with Defered Call Procedure Latency quite often.. Big transfers between hard drives are quite fast, all hard drives are working but the most visible problem is in Directory Opus where the Folder Tree usually blinks quickly (quite refreshes) when i'm doing copies or hard word on the computer...
Has someone got an idea about that ? problem of CPU too small for 2 SATA drives and multi task work ? or maybe sometimes i have not set well somewhere ? I had never seen things like that before upgrading my system disk from PATA 80GB to SATA 500GB and i feel sad
If the new system drive is full or fragmented, or about to fail and having lots of read/write errors & retries, then that could explain the slowdown.
Another possibility, especially if the slowdown started after adding a new drive, is that one of the drives is not in DMA mode and is using the CPU to move data around instead. To check that, go to Device Manager and open properties for all of your IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and see what they're set to. Below is a screenshot showing one of my HDDs and two of my DVD-ROM drives, all with DMA enabled. If you see anything about PIO then that could be the problem.
(I wouldn't worry so much if you have optical drives using PIO, unless the slowness only happens when they're in use.)
While you're in Device Manager, open the Disk Drives section and bring up properties for each of your drives. See if anything looks wrong in their tabs (but don't change anything if you're unsure what it means).
I don't have a specific SATA driver in the Device Manager : only two Storage controllers Ultra ATA 82801EB with two primary IDE and two secondary IDE (i think my motherboard emulates a secondary storage controller for SATA drives)
All drives are in DMA mode (Mode 4 or Mode 5)
and all of them have good parameters in "Drives"
That's strange, the slowness is not very bad but annoying .. all my disks have much free space, and i'm just trying to scan and defrag them all but i usually do it
Maybe the CPU is too small to handle 5 drives including two very fast SATA on a bad disk controller ? do you think adding a PCI SATA controller would be nice for me ?
Unless the CPU usage is really high in Task Manager I wouldn't have thought it would be a CPU issue. More drives would usually only use more CPU if you were using them all at once.
Leo, it's maybe the SATA controller which is not really good and causing delays .. If i find new elements about my problem, i may tell you, but of course Directory Opus is not faulty at all ..
I was just surprised about the folder tree refreshing strangely and knew i could get advices from a super-user like you
thanks again
The folder tree thing is a bit strange. I'd suspect something is constantly sending messages saying a drive has been added or removed, or something like that.
It might be worth using Process Monitor to see what's going on in the background but it can be difficult to tell what's normal background noise and what's unusual. Worth a quick look in case anything obvious stands out, though.
[quote="leo"]The folder tree thing is a bit strange. I'd suspect something is constantly sending messages saying a drive has been added or removed, or something like that.
[/quote]
Exactly .. You know if i'm moving for example a folder "Photos" with 200 or 300 subfolders in it from one disk to another, the Folder tree is quite long to remove every folder from the list and refreshing the tree
It flicks a bit and suppress the entry from folder tree very slowly. And during the whole process, the folder tree is keeping on very fastly blinking .. you know, not black and white, but very small flickering which says to us "strange things are happening on the drives"
I use Sysinternals Process Explorer .. I don't see strange things in background but Dopus is using a quite important part of CPU during copy. There are also Deferred Procedure Calls is sometimes ~10% CPU .. Is there something i should look at in Process Explorer to give you more details ?
(you may note i have disabled anti virus and firewall during my tests to check if it wasn't them which would cause slow process)
Do you have any connections to network drives which are very slowor inaccessible? Or something like a scratched CD, that the OS struggles to read, left in the CD-ROM drive? Things like that might cause the folder tree to refresh very slowly which could be related to what you're seeing.
The network drives thing in particular can have bizarre repercussions across the whole desktop. Stuff that has no obvious connection to network drives run really slowly.
A quick way to check your network connections is to open a Command Prompt and type net use. If the list that comes back isn't empty, see if you can ping each of the machines. e.g. If there's a mapping to \SomeComputer\SomeShare$ then type ping SomeComputer into the command prompt and see if it responds.
Try Process Monitor rather than Process Explorer. (Two very useful Sysinternals tools with unfortunately similar names. )
I'm not sure what that indicates or if it's anything to worry about.
Edit: Just looked up Deferred Procedure Calls and it does seem odd if you're seeing 10% CPU devoted to them. To me that suggests a device driver is going a little haywire (since they seem to be used to handle work for device drivers and it doesn't seem right that you'd see such high CPU usage from a driver when the machine is fairly idle, even on an older CPU).
