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Computer problems
Dec. 27th, 2001 11:57 pmI seem to be having a bizarre computer problem that I can't think of any possible cause for.
Basically, when playing games that do a lot of new loading from disk (Red Faction, Undying -- the kinds of things where you keep getting to new areas), but not when playing games that pretty much run from memory (AOE2 Conquerors, Empire Earth), I get a very bizarre performance issue.
About every 10-20 seconds, the computer freezes up entirely for about 1 second. During this time it makes a loud grinding sound that I presume comes from a hard drive, as I don't know what other part of my computer can make that sound other than the floppy and/or CD-ROM drives, all of which are empty.
My hard drive consists of two 30GB IBM 75GXP hard drives in an IDE RAID on a Promise FastTrak100 PCI controller. I downloaded IBM's hard drive diagnostic utility, and after being quite impressed that it could find and test two NTFS-formatted hard drives attached to a PCI RAID controller from DOS, of all places, discovered that it says both hard drives are fine. It did an hour-long test on each of them, testing the interface, seeking, surface scan, mechanical test, etc. Both drives returned okay.
In Windows, however, is another story. SiSoft Sandra reports my hard drive performance at about 11,000. The reference performance for a 7200RPM ATA/100 RAID is 36,000. Mine is performing about as well as a single 5,200 RPM ATA/66 drive. It doesn't sound especially happy during this test, either.
The really weird thing is that I've not really changed anything drive-related in the last two days, and this problem basically started in the last two days. I'd heard some odd noises from the drives before, and occasional 1-second hangs in Windows, but nothing like this -- games I played non-stop a couple days ago are totally unplayable now. I've certainly made some computer changes, though -- I upgraded my GeForce2 GTS to a GeForce3 Ti500, and added two new case fans for better cooling. However, I don't see how this could be remotely related.
There have been no data errors from any of this... just the 1-second hangs at intermittent intervals while trying to do disk access.
Any ideas? The only one I have so far is to disjoin the RAID, install an OS on each of them, and try the Sandra benchmark in Windows on each drive to see if one of them is responsible for the atrocious perf characteristics. The problem with this, of course, is that disjoining the raid wipes out 60GB of stuff, and doing two Windows installs and running benchmarks takes quite the pile of time. I have room to back it up, but it's a major pain to set everything up again.
Basically, when playing games that do a lot of new loading from disk (Red Faction, Undying -- the kinds of things where you keep getting to new areas), but not when playing games that pretty much run from memory (AOE2 Conquerors, Empire Earth), I get a very bizarre performance issue.
About every 10-20 seconds, the computer freezes up entirely for about 1 second. During this time it makes a loud grinding sound that I presume comes from a hard drive, as I don't know what other part of my computer can make that sound other than the floppy and/or CD-ROM drives, all of which are empty.
My hard drive consists of two 30GB IBM 75GXP hard drives in an IDE RAID on a Promise FastTrak100 PCI controller. I downloaded IBM's hard drive diagnostic utility, and after being quite impressed that it could find and test two NTFS-formatted hard drives attached to a PCI RAID controller from DOS, of all places, discovered that it says both hard drives are fine. It did an hour-long test on each of them, testing the interface, seeking, surface scan, mechanical test, etc. Both drives returned okay.
In Windows, however, is another story. SiSoft Sandra reports my hard drive performance at about 11,000. The reference performance for a 7200RPM ATA/100 RAID is 36,000. Mine is performing about as well as a single 5,200 RPM ATA/66 drive. It doesn't sound especially happy during this test, either.
The really weird thing is that I've not really changed anything drive-related in the last two days, and this problem basically started in the last two days. I'd heard some odd noises from the drives before, and occasional 1-second hangs in Windows, but nothing like this -- games I played non-stop a couple days ago are totally unplayable now. I've certainly made some computer changes, though -- I upgraded my GeForce2 GTS to a GeForce3 Ti500, and added two new case fans for better cooling. However, I don't see how this could be remotely related.
There have been no data errors from any of this... just the 1-second hangs at intermittent intervals while trying to do disk access.
Any ideas? The only one I have so far is to disjoin the RAID, install an OS on each of them, and try the Sandra benchmark in Windows on each drive to see if one of them is responsible for the atrocious perf characteristics. The problem with this, of course, is that disjoining the raid wipes out 60GB of stuff, and doing two Windows installs and running benchmarks takes quite the pile of time. I have room to back it up, but it's a major pain to set everything up again.
