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Hard drive access pause

post #1 of 9
3/16/03 at 3:23pm
Thread Starter 
Hey there

I've noticed more and more that whenever my 8886 needs to access hard drive (internal 5400 -or- my external 7200) the system "pauses" while the drive begins to spin. Normally, this doesn't matter, but when I'm projecting video, it will just freeze for a second every time I go to load a new clip (after enough wait that the hard drive spins down).
So is there any way to tell the drives to "keep spinning" or a way to disable the access pauses?

Thanks in advance.
-Optikalusion-
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post #2 of 9
3/16/03 at 3:44pm
Do you have the applications accelerator and chipset drivers installed? Run some benches (SiSoft) to make sure it's up to spec.
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post #3 of 9
3/16/03 at 4:49pm
Thread Starter 
I installed the chipset and application accelerator, and I think all is well with them. I went ahead and ran the sisoft thing but I'm not quite sure what it is supposed to tell me. There are tips and error messages all over the report. Should I post it here???

thanks again
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post #4 of 9
3/16/03 at 6:19pm
Run the system benchmarks and check the scores for any abnormally low ones.
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post #5 of 9
3/19/03 at 6:51pm
Thread Starter 
Everything in the tests seens okay. . . Do you think the paging file trick would help this? Set the paging file at 0 so the 1gig of ram is used instead? Does anyone else have this intermittent "pause" while the computer is reading the drive?

thanks again
chris
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post #6 of 9
3/22/03 at 12:10am

!

I had a similar problem when playing bf1942. It was pausing for about 1 second about every 5 seconds! It was really annoying because it would happen when I was shooting at someone, but it paused and they killed me while my computer hung up! Oddly enough, I remembered that I was messing around with the power management settings in the BIOS. It turns out that the problem was traced to the power setting being set to high, which would spin down the hard disk every 5 seconds. I just went to custom and told it to never turn off. I haven't had the problem since!
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post #7 of 9
3/22/03 at 12:35am
You can try to move the pagefile, but I would reformat. Maybe try to defrag, but it shouldn't be causing something that extreme.
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post #8 of 9
3/22/03 at 1:32am
That sounds like power management, like the other guys said. Hard disks take a sec to "wake up" after the system has purposely powered them down due to idle time.

Jeff
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post #9 of 9
3/23/03 at 7:05pm
Thread Starter 

oh baby

OKay that was totally the answer!

After changing the bios to keep the drive "Always On," those lag times are GONE. I was under the impression that XP overrode the bios when you changed the power options (like max battery for throttling down the processor speed).

Thanks a million guys, life is much smoother now!

-chris
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