Extreme slowness on SSD systems?
A friend of mine has a laptop with an SSD. Recently the system was crawling at a fraction of its former speed, with no logical explanation. After a lot of time with tech support, he discovered that the DMA controller on the drive was shot, which forced everything to go through the CPU. To check this out for yourself, look at the IDE channel’s properties in Device Manager. If the IDE channel is set to “Auto Detect” but is running in PIO mode, that’s the problem and the drive will need to be replace. The screenshot if from Windows XP.
J.Ja
Categories: Storage
I remember in the old days when overclockers would deliberately put their IDE controllers in PIO mode so that they can squeeze an extra 2% to 4% clock speed out of their CPU and bus. Only problem was that they put an extra 100 times load on their CPU and used up 90% of their CPU to handle storage requests.
The extreme overclockers would always do stupid things like this. They still do stupid things like turn off Turbo in their Nehalem processors which can’t really be made up by brute overclocking, since Turbo boosts 2-core workloads higher than 4-core.
Windows is know to reset the controller back to lower-speed modes if one of the devices on it produces a lot of errors. This can be a problem if you have an optical drives which reads a scratched disk and a HDD (SSD?) on the same controller. Several years ago I’ve put together instructions on how to fix it by a small registry hack and also created a program to do so: http://hype-free.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-pio-mode-fallback-problem.html