[mctw]

okay, ive just been given an dead external hdd, which after much fiddling ive managed to extra from its casing, stupid none return clips! anyway, its a SATA2 hdd, so have installed it into my machine, which it recgonised instantly in the bios and installed fine. But when its in use, aka copying a file onto it, or defraging it, the entire system lags, music slows and stutters, and the mouse is like its in treacle.
looking in process explorer, i see that 'Hardware Interrupts' is using almost all cpu time, as well is it copying abismaly slowly.

ive tried plugging it into a different port, which makes no difference. the hdd casing was toast i think, when plugged it in refused to show any sign of life at all, not a light etc.

any ideas why it makes the machine lag so much? and copies so slowly?

MCTW

EDIT, sorry about the name of the post, typo, my bad.

[mctw]

and cheers to who ever changed my thread title, I didn't notice until I had made the thread, and the edit function doesn't let you change it.

MCTW

[Carbon]

IRQ conflict or the drive is indeed dead.

[mctw]

ermm, im hoping this isnt a to dumb question, but what might a IRQ conflict be? in reasonably simple terms if possible

according the the readout using SMART (if thats any good) the drive is in good health. ive been running it though, and it seems to have a number of corruptions, most of which have been fixed by chkdsk so far.

[Carbon]

SMART is useless, if the disk has bad sectors just throw it out or at least don't put any more data on it. the drive is failing, end of story.

[cheesepuff]

if its a SATA driver and you plug it into a purple connector on the MOBO, it will use the CPU power instead of the North Bridge chip set, which in turn can cause massive CPU usage and lag (i learned this the hard way lol)