4 replies to this topic

[nosammai]

I installed a second hard drive into my Alienware M14x by replacing the optical drive with a caddy. I installed lion on the second hard drive, and it boots fine, but it's really slow after it boots. Sometimes when I click on anything, it just hangs for about 10 seconds then loads, but it's pretty inconsistent - sometimes its fine, sometimes it hangs. It's odd because I had lion working perfectly fine in the primary HDD bay, but when I move it to the optical drive caddy, it's slows down.

I was having this same problem in Windows, but I fixed it by installing Intel's Rapid Storage Technology drivers. Is there some sort of equivalent Kext, or something else that I should be doing to make it work properly? System Information says it's got an Intel 6 Series chipset. I know the optical drive port is only SATA 1.5 Gbps, but I don't think that should really affect it as much as it is.

[nosammai]

I got everything else working(QE/CI, Ethernet, sound, USB, PS/2), but I can't seem to figure this one out.

It's not that the disk is getting slow transfer speeds - they're up where they should be for a SATA 1.5 Gbps HDD. I opened up Activity monitor to look at the graph for disk activity, and it looks like there are spikes of I/O (Of normal speed) separated by valleys of 0 I/O. The spaces are all similar in length. I also did a benchmark in OSX on the HDD and it came out normal.

Again, I was having almost the same issue in windows that was solved by installing the Intel RST driver, but I'm not sure what the equivalent would be in OSX. I've been going at this for about three days now, and it's getting really frustrating.

Any and all help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[3.14r2]

What chipset and south bridge the PC has? Are both drives using the very same disk controller?

[nosammai]

I believe it has the Intel HM67 Chipset

[xplus93]

I know this is old, but the ODD uses SATA I/1.5 compared to the SATA II/3.0 of the HDD. Hope this helps, just use the secondary drive for storage space and you'll be fine.