added 2nd hard drive affects performance!

[JCKnife]

Here's a strange one...I was out of room on my HD so tonight I added a second one. I moved all my Nintendo emu's to the new drive (just moved them over). Now VisualBoyAdvance, FCEU and Project64 are all running slow / choppy. ZSNES seems fine.

Should I not have moved them? I'm thinking I'll uninstall and reinstall them.

EDIT: above is my original message but I was being very short-sighted and only playing the emus I had moved. I now realize that I'm having system-wide performance issues: I'm running a P 4 3.0 GHz with 512 MB ram. Before the 2nd hard drive it ran several high-demand ROMS just fine, including Simpsons Bowling and the MK series. Now MK II is unplayably slow.

What did I do? Why would adding a 2nd hard drive cause such a hit in performance?

[testicle187]

I would make sure your power supply is putting out enough juice for the extra drive.  Also, is the drive you installed "New" and freshly formatted?  If you take an old drive with a different (or even the same) operating system on it and install it on a system it can cause problems as well. 

Try disconnecting the power cable or the IDE ribbon on your newly installed drive and see if your computer runs better again.  Thats my .02, hope it helps.

[NeeBick]

First defrag both hard drives.

Second, there are tons of reasons: where is your drive hooked up to (did you hook it to the same cable as your other hd or did you connect with your cd-rom, big no-no)?  Are you using the correct cable (ata-100 vs ata-66)?  I'm sure I can think of more just give me an idea of your configuration.

If anything a second hard drive should make your computer faster since it would take strain off the hd with os on it.

[JCKnife]

The problem was so immediate and pronounced, I can't imagine it's a defrag issue.

I added the second drive on the same cable as the first. Configured the original as master and new one as slave via jumpers.

I'm starting to think that something got screwed up software wise when I made the change. For example I moved Project 64 to the new drive and I know it writes to the registry...could it have mucked something up? I dunno.

I'm going to try unplugging the new drive (from power and IDE) and see if that fixes the problem.

Could partitioning be an issue? I don't understand partitioning so when I added this drive and formatted it, I partitioned it as "primary" (same as the first, C: drive).

[jcrouse]

Sounds like you formatted properly. The frist partition on a drive SHOULD be the primary. Aslo, if your using WIndows 2000/XP with larger disks I would recommend formatting as NTFS for better performance.

John

[NeeBick]

I was just getting the easily overlooked problems out of the way.  I know a ton of ppl who complain to me about their computer running several times slower and its usually fragmentation.  When you move large sums of data (i.e. roms) major fragmentation tends to happen that why I suggested that.

[jcrouse]

Another thing to check is the swap file.

John

[Kook]

A few things to try:

- See if your master is jumpered as "Master" when it really should be jumpered as "Master with Slave Present".
- Defrag
- If you are running XP, you can hit ctl+alt+del, look at processes, and try to get an idea which process is using CPU cycles (or maybe spot some unnecessary programs running)
- Do a virus scan.
- Check both drives for errors.

Let us know what you find.

Kook

[Edgedamage]

Are both drives the same RPM? If one is slower the system defaults to the slowest drive.

[JCKnife]

Problem was not a slow drive, but a slow CPU.

Turned out to be a power problem--see topic in Main Forum.