Second hard drive woes

2and2is5

Right now my computer has two hard drives. The first is the one with windows, my games/apps, etc. I have a pretty big music collection, and I'm always getting new stuff, so I decided to install a second hard drive and move all my music over there. Here's the issue: Anytime I try to play music from said drive, it skips. I've also noticed that just accessing it tends to bog my computer down. Obviously this makes keeping my music there completely useless, and I really have no idea how to go about fixing it.

Both hard drives are Western Digital. I have the drive with windows set up as the master, and the one with the music set up as the slave.

Help me H&A, I want to hear music again.

urahonky

I'd run a copy of TuffTest on the 2nd hard drive and see if there's any skipping/slowing involved. It might be going under... How old is it?

Ruckus

That's kind of odd, even as a slave on the same channel as your system partition there should be more than enough bandwidth to play music.

One thing you could try is moving the secondary harddrive to the secondary channel as a slave, or even as a master.

Malkor

Maybe there isn't enough power getting to it?

mechaThor

I've had this same problem in the past (still a problem, for that matter) with a secondary harddrive as a slave with music skipping and file transfers being abominably slow so if anybody knows how to fix it that would be awesome. A question though, can low RAM affect it in any way? iirc I'm only running on 512 MB.

DrFrylock

Couple things to check; all these apply for non-serial ATA only:

1. Are both hard drives on the same IDE cable? If not, then they shouldn't be set up as Master/Slave.
2. It may be something's bad on the IDE cable, so try with a different cable.
3. If they are on the same IDE cable, switch their positions and see what happens.
4. Check in your BIOS and make sure that DMA is enabled for that hard drive.
5. In Device Manager, go under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and right-click on Primary IDE Channel (or Secondary IDE channel, whichever is appropriate). Hit Properties. Under "Advanced Settings" make sure that the Current Transfer Mode is some flavor of DMA for both drives, and that the Transfer Mode is set to "DMA if available."

2and2is5

DrFrylock wrote: »

Couple things to check; all these apply for non-serial ATA only:

Did #5, both are DMA if available, I'll try to get to the rest tomorrow...