Very odd hardware bug

[Artemus]

I've had a peculiar experience that is rather confusing, so if anyone can make heads or tails of it, I'd appreciate it.

For a while, I thought I had a major problem with the Bot macro. I run 3 casters and a tank, and I could not start the three caster macros at the same time. The PC would freeze for at least 10 if not 15 minutes. Solid. I could walk away and eat. I didn't bother asking Pete. I pester him enough. The workaround was start one, wait for it to finish, then the next, etc.

Now, EQ and the MMObugs folders are both on the C drive, an SSD, specifically for speed. They were not on the D drive. My D drive was a Seagate.

Two weeks ago I had a catastrophic disk failure with the D drive. In hindsight, the warnings were there but I missed them. It took longer to spin up from idle, it took much longer to load stuff, etc. Eventually it wouldn't load or copy anything.

Anyway, I read many of the stories on the web about how 3TB Seagate drives were time bombs and had a ridiculous failure rate. Mine was a 2TB Seagate. I saw HGST has the best record, so I bought one of them as a replacement.

(Here's the part that really counts)

Since installing the HGST drive, there is no hesitation with starting Bot.mac. I can start it on all 3 accounts at the same time and it is running on all three within a minute. There is no hang.

Now, this baffles me. As I said, the EQ folder and Bugs are on the SSD, not the HDD. And starting up Bot should be a memory and CPU thing or the source drive. Certainly not the D drive that holds nothing related to the game.

So can anyone figure out why a bad hard drive would bring a Bot load to a total halt?

 

[Randyleo]

The pc could not talk to the HDD, it kept trying, thus bringing things to a halt.

 

[dewey2461]

Yah - but why would loading EQ from c: cause the d: to stall ?

 

[Randyleo]

Windows polls all drives when loading programs, it couldn't poll the D: drive.

 

[Artemus]

Windows polls all drives when loading programs, it couldn't poll the D: drive.

Interesting. Never knew that. Wonder why it does that.

 

[htw]

Did you perchance have windows swap set up to use the D: drive, or have it using D: at all? It's common for people to do that when they are concerned about SSD I/O impact and/or capacity.

As far as any 'polling' you aren't going to be affected by it, even with a drive issue like you describe, unless something is happening at the time (or much of the time) with the controller for a I/O bottleneck.

htw

 

[Artemus]

No nothing was set to the D drive.

Well there is only one thing I can think of. I recently reinstalled Windows 7 and made a mistake.

Windows has a very obscure bug. If you reinstall it fresh on the C: drive but leave other drives connected, it leaves bits and pieces of Windows on those drives. The result is a slow-down in performance. I learned this from Anandtech. When you reinstall Windows 7, disconnect all the other drives but the C:/boot disk. The difference is remarkable.

I had reinstalled Win7 and thought the slow-down of my PC was due to forgetting to disconnect the drives. Turns out the D: drive was dying on its own and had nothing to do with the reinstall issue.