Super slow hard drive in windows install

So I have a computer with two 2TB hard drives in Windows XP formatted as NTFS, one of them is working fine so I get around 80 MB/s transfer which is normal. But on the other hard drive I only get 4 MB/s. Neither are the primary hard drive.

However if I boot into the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows they booth perform around 80 MB/s.

The fast hard drive is formatted as two large NTFS partitions while the slow drive is mostly one large NTFS partition with three other small partitions that don't get assigned drive letters.

Does anyone know what could cause this issue? I've tried disabling McAfee virus scanner and ZoneAlarm but that didn't help anything.

Jason Axelson

Posted 2009-11-20T09:31:39.987

Reputation: 1 390

Answers

perhaps the file system size is too big for XP (assume 32bit) I've seen NTFS performance go down on large sizes (though I had not that big filesystems, yet)

JumpingPA

Posted 2009-11-20T09:31:39.987

Reputation: 214

Can this be changed without reformatting the drive? – kevininspace – 2010-06-26T16:00:37.353

Yeah that's one of my guesses, but it seems weird because it works fine on the Windows XP on the Ultimate Boot CD, which I believe is also 32 bit. However, it is something to try. – Jason Axelson – 2009-11-20T17:54:13.817