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General discussion

HD perf problem with ACER Aspire 1802

Oct 19, 2004 3:55PM PDT

Hi,

I just bought an Aspire 1802SWMi from Acer cause on paper, it was the best value I can get.

Unfortunately, after two weeks playing with it, I am quiet disapointed with the hard drive performance. This is a disaster !!! I get transfer rate of 300 Kbps where I should have 20 Mbps. So when Windows start to swap, it takes minutes. When I switch from one app to another and Windows refresh the screen, I have time to watch every single line drawing on the screen for long minutes, normaly, it should take a fingers snap! My first investigation lead me to the following conclusion :

1802 suffer terrible design flaw.

1st the HD. It's a Toshiba MK-8025GAS that show the following spec : 80Gb, 4200RPM, ATA 2 to 6, UDMA 100, 8Mb cache. Those are correct numbers, even if I was expecting 5400RPM disk. Nevertheless, this is acceptable.

2nd the chipset. It's an Intel 915P. This seems nice but with a closer look, we see the host controler is a 82801FB. The problem with that chipset is that Intel does not offer optimized ATA driver for it. So we are stuck with Windows XP default ATA driver that is so slow That is a shame to advertise high performance chipset and to implement lowcost variation that finally offer poor performance.

3rd the design. But the worth part is coming. If you take a close look to the device manager, you can see that only the Primary IDE channel is enable. The secondary controller has been disabled and there's no Bios option to change that setting. And finally, the HD that should support UDMA mode 5 is connected as Primary Master and the DVD-RW as Primary slave. The problem with this setup is that DVD-RW only support UDMA mode 2 (that is to say ATA-33) so the HD is also stuck to ATA-33.

How Acer's ingeneer can think of and even produce so poorly designed notebook ?

The whole storage chain is so rotted that the splendid P4 3Ghz is useless. It spends half of its time waiting for data to process.

When trying to burn a DVD-R at 8x, that data rate is so slow on the IDE bus that it keep stoping every 2% to refill the buffer !!!

I did contact the Acer support about that problem. They answer me to format my HD to fix the problem. Weird !

Any idea, trick, hack to fix this mess will be very welcome.

Cheers.
Jiminy

Discussion is locked

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Re: HD perf problem with ACER Aspire 1802
Oct 23, 2004 11:14PM PDT

It is always best to try any notebook in person in a retail store or kiosk (Dell has mall kiosks now at least in the US) so you can be sure you don't have an ergonomic problem or discover some other issue with the notebook that is not apparent when reading online technical specifications.

Unfortunately, ordering an Acer or Fujitsu (Fujitsu is available at Fry's Electronics but not many other places offline) is taking this risk of buying without trying.

I highly recommend ordering an HP or Compaq custom order at hpshopping (or a Dell in some cases or even some Toshibas custom order) but the keyboard and general opearation should ALWAYS be tried out first in person somewhere.

If you have a friend or colleage with an Acer or Asus great -- otherwise, how???

Perhaps your issue is a problem with this notebook only (send it in under warranty) or a worm or spyware issue but if not try out any prospective notebook first even if ordering it ultimately online later.

Many people, however, including our moderator Bob have an Acer so perhaps your problem can be resolved.

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Re: HD perf problem with ACER Aspire 1802
Oct 24, 2004 5:30PM PDT

Hi Ken,

Thanks for your input. You're absolutely right, I should have tried it before I order. Too bad...

I've found some time to reinstall a brand new Windows XP. I didn't use ACER CD but a Windows original instead. Then I setup every necessary driver provide by ACER...

So guess what... It didn't change things. The HD perfs are still crapy . I run HD Tune benchmark again. Just after starting, the HD perf drop to 1.1 Mb/s then it rose between 15 and 20 Mb/s.

I didn't find any way to enable the secondary IDE controller so I didn't even open the notebook to check if there was a connector on board for it. Thus, HD that is U-DMA 5 capable is still stuck to U-DMA 2 like the DVD drive it share the IDE channel with

This overall confirm my first judgement that this notebook suffer serious design flaw.

Does anyone think switching from 4200RPM to 5400 or 7200RPM will enhance the HD perf since it will always be stuck in U-DMA 2 mode ?

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Re: HD perf problem with ACER Aspire 1802
Oct 25, 2004 4:21AM PDT

If you are suffering this slow performance and reformatted the entire operating system (and readded drivers) then you should have cleared any spyware or virus/ etc as a factor.

Hopefully, you are still in the return period where you can return the notebook or at least call Acer and see what their service can do for you.

There have been many people happy with the Acer 2000 series (example Acer 2025) and that is built on the same chassis as my Compaq X1000 series (same as HPZT3000 series) but I am unfamiliar with the exact specs of the Acer 1802.

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Re: HD perf problem with ACER Aspire 1802
Oct 27, 2004 5:04PM PDT

Thanks Ken,

I'll check Acer support again to see what they can come with.

Regards.
Jim