The most common cause is that it's running in PIO mode, not DMA. It's not slower per se, but your CPU is doing all the heavy lifting instead of the chip onboard the drive. So, any other programs competing for CPU time will slow things down.
Also, there's really nothing to be gained by having the drive on the secondary channel. Swap access is slow no matter what. So slow, that you're unlikely to see any real difference. There are all kinds of rumors and wives tales like that from days long past in computing. Even then, they were almost always based on misinterpreted or misunderstood bits of information someone read. One of my favorite examples, is how people think that more than 512MB of RAM will slow down some versions of Windows. This is based on a misinterpretation of the fact that some systems cannot cache memory addresses above 512MB. That is all true enough, but it doesn't take into account that even uncached memory will be thousands of times faster than the alternative, of using swap space. It may not be as fast as fully cached memory, but it's far from making your system slower.
Anyway, there have been countless posts made about how to check whether the drive is in DMA or PIO mode, so just run a search of the forums or Google and you're bound to come up with plenty of links.
Hi I purchased a new 250GB Hard drive, and while putting it in my computer, I noticed my old hard drive was set to "slave", I remember putting it in that way because the hard drive, which is an 80GB drive, wouldn't work any other way. In order to get the second drive to work, I put the new drive on the secondary IDE channel, and booted into windows. I opened my computer, and double clicked on the new icon, and realized that something wasn't right. There was about 100Gb of ripped dvd's on the drive already. I double clicked on a folder, and noticed the hard drive took a long time to access the files.
I then went to format the drive using the built in windows tool, and four hours later, its still going.
Its a 7200RPM Maxtor(yes, i know) with a 16mb cache. Can anyone offer any insight as to why its running so slowly, and why the format is taking so long? I read that putting the second drive on the secondary ide channel is a good idea because you can put the page file on the second drive for faster access times.
Thanks,
Matt
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