I know that computer hardware isn't really music, but this disk does have my music data on it so it sort of counts... any techies out there that can offer help? i have a system with two distinct boot drives ...windows XP 32 bit on each....one is for internet and day to day (F drive) , the other for audio (C drive) (no internet connection/AV, anti spyware etc)

    my G drive (RAID 0 - striped) the one in question, is the music data drive, but I access it from both ...it also contains the pagefile for all stuff.. when i boot into the audio drive the transfer rate on the G drive is showing as 133MB/s this is fine and as expected. however in the last few days when i check the G drive transfer speed from the F drive it is shownig as about 3.3MB/s ...which is virtually non-existent and not useable really

   . the G drive is pretty full but this doesn't explain the difference..it can't be the hardware or else it would be bad on both...its not the BIOS settings because they load before the boot options menu, I've tried booting into safe mode with networking...still 3.3 MB/s when accessing from F drive..

 I've tried disabling my firewall and AV software and scanning the F and G drive...nothing there..it can't be errors in data i don't think. I checked in device manager to see what the differences are in configuration between the C and F drives ...not anything unexpected...i can't see anything starting in process explorer which would cause that behaviour...

any ideas please?

A quick test would be to disconnect the RAID disks temporarily and use "other" alternate disks in place of the existing ones. If the fault disappears, then it *could* be one of the original RAID disks is faulty and it's dragging down the overall performance. Worth checking, imho.

cheers Rab, but wouldn't a fault in one of the disks be reflected in a slow-down across the board...not just when accessing the disk from one of dual boot OS's ?

 i did a quick check error scan with HD tune and it came up clean..i'm not sure if thats significant.

With most *suspected*  hardware faults, it's the process of swapping-out a physical component with a known good one whiich will prove or disprove the possibility of that component being defective, Ben. One can speculate and overthink the "fault", but it's only when hardware has been swapped-out and the fault still exists can we eliminate that component from our investigations. Indeed, it could be a number of things - but, short of using completely empty storage media and a complete system rebuild, the component swap-out is by far the quickest way to establish some vital facts. It's worth a try :o)

fixed it....i restored from a backup i made a couple of months ago and its back working...i reckon it could have been a damaged registry or maybe even a nasty. thanks for your help Rab.

Saved..... I was about to offer my two penneth.... you are fortunate:) well done Ben

Firstly on my raid array software there is the option to rebuild. I used this on two PCs that kept reporting that HDDs were faulty. That solved those problems.

The second situation was related to adding a pair of disks to my own Raid array. The immediate tech terms are not easily remembered but they both had to be recognised, defined and then formatted I think. Not your situation I know. However I know that getting the software to recognise new disks and to get them operational was perhaps a common issue.

Very pleased you have resolved it though Ben - mine caused the greatest dispair. Anybody who quoted "It's not if it happens, it is when it happens" got a very stong leaflet campaign focus from me.

Great that you got it sorted out, Ben. That was a lot of downtime, though.

Not that I'm being smug about anything.... I'm really not....but with an image made of your perfectly configured DAW build, you could have been back up again in 10 minutes. There's some food for thought? Another one is to run your DAW very light and pulll your projects in from external storage and put them back there when you're done. Of course it goes without saying to have your O/S on one hdd and your active project on another. I just hate being in a situation it's hard to recover from and do everything I can to avoid downtime. I'll sometimes re-image my DAW just to keep it "fresh" :o)

yuo can be smug if you want, and so can I :) ...this was my G drive luckily not my C drive...the G drive is where all my raw data goes for my projects..its an external drive and i keep an image of my audio drive with backup software...i couldn't agree more about backing up...... unfortunately i can't back up my g drive fully because drives are still pricey and its 1.1TB..

 the downtime has been because i haven't been feeling so good...not really feeling creative, or maybe got out of the habit of it.

best wishes Ben:)

The main thing is you're back up and running, Ben.

Hope you're feeling better today :o)

the problem occurred again..its when i defragment the G drive in question.

  I'm pretty sure its because i deleted the G drive usn journal a few weeks back to try to gain as good a defrag as i could...ie everything tightly bunched up.

 I'm not going to overthink it at the moment .any computer techs on here know if and how to rebuild the journal (is it on the root OS drive)?

I've done some seraching but a little unclear as to what to do.

 Rab, a little better thanks but then i came down with a cold...which actually makes me feel better at the beginning and end of it.