right i'm pretty sure i've got a problem with one of my drives. its a WD1200JB think its about 4 years old now. well anyway when i navigate through the folders the cpu usage jumps to 100% or there about. Does this sound like a normal symptom to get from a duff drive? I doubt its the mobo as thats less than a year old and the other drives on it seam fine. I'm currently running the WD extended test to see if its a problem on the drive but would expect it to be the disc controller. Thanks
Are you sure its in DMA mode? If its in PIO mode (which uses the CPU 100% and is slow), then you need to change it. Device Manager should be able to show you whether its in DMA mode or not. (I think).
Yeah, do make sure that it's using DMA - go to the Device Manager, right click the relevant IDE channel and then select Properties. Head over to Advanced Settings and it'll tell you the transfer mode. I don't know how it would have slipped into PIO mode, which is pretty old (obsolete with the introduction of ATA-4), but chances are that it's what's causing the issue. Also... this might not be relevant, but if you have the NVIDIA nForce4 IDE drivers installed, remove those too as they're notorious for causing a variety of problems.
for some reason windows has put it in PIO mode becasue of exsessive transfers errors. its also dropped the master drive down to UDMA 4 which is strange will have to check the cable it think
Make sure you're using 80-conductor cables for the drives and remove those IDE drivers! Change the cables if the problem still occurs
