Slow Second Hard Drive?

[nosammai 11]

I'm having some trouble with my second hard drive in my M14x.

I bought an OCZ Vertex 3 120gb SSD, replaced the stock WD 500gb Scorpio Black drive with it. Then I put that drive into a caddy in place of the optical drive. Windows recognizes the drive, and I can use it, but it runs intermittently slowly. I ran benchmarks with HDTune and they came out normal with an average of ~60MB/s transfer speeds.

However, I installed itunes onto the SSD and pointed the media directory to the HDD where I copied all of my music onto (which transferred perfectly fine). Now iTunes is going through and 'Determining Gapless Playback Information' for all of my songs, but it will go for a while, then stop, then continue and repeat that process. When it hangs, iTunes is completely unusable, any song that was playing stops, and it won't let me browse through the files on the HDD with Windows Explorer. I'm pretty sure it isn't just iTunes because when I browse through the hard drive in explorer and play a song with VLC, it will take a while to load the song, during which time I can't browse any other files on the disk.

The drive shows up as SATA 3 Gb/s in HWiNFO. I read that the Hard Drive has to be set to SATA 1.5Gb/s mode in order to work with the Optical drive port. Is there any way to do that with the stock Western Digital drive? I've seen people with similar issues in that their drives consistently run at a slower speed, or don't work at all, but I haven't seen anyone else whose drive inconsistently locks up.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[nosammai 11]

Update: I measured the amount of time of each hang and they are all exactly 1 minute. I'm watching the disk IO graphs on the Resource manager, and during each hang the blue line is at the top of the graph, and the green shaded line goes all the way down. When it is working, the blue line usually follows the green one, but slightly above. One minute also happens to be the amount of time that it takes for a full pass of the length of the graph.

[Michael 1315]

Anything of interest in event viewer under system logs?

Sent from my ParanoidAndroid powered GNote

[Stevenxowens792 806]

nosammai - You may need to install the Intel Rapid Storage Device Drivers (utility) and then in the setup have it set to start immediately (not delayed start in services). Again im just guessing here. when I ran 2 drives in my m14xr1 it was a pain in the butt. The 2nd (in optical port) would cut out or disappear a lot.

[rainmakerr 10]

Same here man. When I had the scorpio in my caddy it used to be slow and sometimes Windows does not even recognize it.

Will probably just get a 256gb SSD and be done with it. It's really not worth all the hassle

[mw86 1362]

Same here man. When I had the scorpio in my caddy it used to be slow and sometimes Windows does not even recognize it.

Will probably just get a 256gb SSD and be done with it. It's really not worth all the hassle

Okay so its the drive and not the caddy in general i guess.

[Agustin 10]

I had this problem as well with a Western Digital drive in the caddy when used in place of the DVD drive, the solution I found online was to use a Seagate drive (Seagate's still have jumper pins) and install a jumper that would lock the drive to SATA I speeds. Once I did this my drive performance became consistent. Just as an FYI, the Seagate exhibited the same performance problems as the WD did when I tried to use it without the jumper.

[citrix 11]

hi , I do have 2nd hdd using hdd caddy , since the 2nd hdd disappear. it will add report failure inside s.m.a.r.t : UltraDMA CRC Error Count

[Smokemr 10]

I had the same problem after I moved my WD 500 to a caddy. After I flashed back to A05 from A08 the second drive worked fine, but now the GF 555 has an error in device manager.

[Smokemr 10]

After I installed an SSD and moved my 500 to a caddy, the second drive was unresponsive at times and slow too. I tried the Dell A05 which fixed my Sata issues, but my GF 555 had an error. I flashed back to the Dell A08 and now both drives are working fine. Go figure.

[NforceRaid 12]

After I installed an SSD and moved my 500 to a caddy, the second drive was unresponsive at times and slow too. I tried the Dell A05 which fixed my Sata issues, but my GF 555 had an error. I flashed back to the Dell A08 and now both drives are working fine. Go figure.

hi, have not tried with the A08 Bios Mod with SATA fix.

hi

[cheeheng92 10]

same thing happened to me. it worked fine at first, the write speed could go very high but then it just drops very very fast and stuck at 1mbps. It just takes forever to move all the files.

[bluefalcon13 10]

I didnt notice any issues on my seagate (w/ jumper installed), but I did have quite a few hangs on boot (windows 7) and just general performance issues without the jumper.

Sent from my GT-P7310 using Tapatalk HD

[lftft 10]

It looks like maybe the bios version could be responsible--anyone have issues with a "sata fixed" bios?

[white_star 10]

Is the optical drive sata port sata2 or 3? and can it be unlocked using one of the bios updates. I want a second drive but would like fast speeds

[abuacool 10]

I know this is na old post, but I am also experiencing this problem...

I recently upgraded my M14xR1 with a SSD and put my original Samsung drive in the optical bay using a caddy... To copy my old fyles I kept my HDD intact and started Windows from it without having any problems. But when I used my SSD as the OS, the access to the 2nd hdd is extremelly slow.

I'll try flashing the BIOS with a diferente version, but I am very diaspointed...

[newraze 10]

So is it worth me swapping the optical drive out for a hdd caddy then getting a ssd on the m14x r2? I'm using a modded version of a13 bios that I downloaded from here.