PS2 HDD slow seek times...Follow

Different sort of question, didn't see anything like it asked before. I know that this forum is more for PC issues, but maybe you guys would want to take a stab at this problem.

I normally play FFXI on the PC and my wife plays on our PS2. We moved to our new house and it had been quite a while since I'd fired up the PS2, so I was going to try to download that recent patch.

When the PS2 starts it goes to the browser. From there I select the HDD, then the POL viewer which starts the game. Normally I can go through all of this with no problems, but after the move, it takes FOREVER to get from selecting the POL viewer to the sign in screen for POL. The graphic that shows that the PS2 is "thinking" plays on and on and it never even used to appear.

Thinking that this was an issue with the install I used the HDD utility disc to reformat the HDD. I also used the error dectection feature the disc had and it didn't find any errors. I then took the HDD out and made sure the connections were clean between the HDD and the Network Adapter.

After putting everything back together I proceeded to install FFXI. This took an incredibly long time, I'd guess it was somewhere around 3 hours to install the game. I remember it was about 45min or even less when I first did it. Trying to install the updates, it has to think for quite a while in between each file downloaded, the time listed to complete the update is in excess of 9 hours.

Obviously something is terribly wrong. As far as I can tell the connections between the HDD and the Network Adapter are ok, I've taken it out and put it back in several times to make sure everything is snug. I'm running out of ideas and at this point getting a new PS2 or HDD is not an option.

Is there any sort of tests that can be run on the HDD? Has anyone ever tried hooking one of these up to a PC as a slave drive or something? Just want to make sure I try everything before I declare it dead.

Well I reformatted the HDD and started to install the POL viewer this morning. It had been 2 hours since I started until I left for work and it was 37% done installing when I left. Seems kind of excessive.

I'm currently trying to get one of my other HDD's to work but it's slow going, I can't get the PS2 to recognize it and I'm having troubles finding something that will format it to the PS2 file format.

Actually, it was a problem with the connection from the PS2 to the HDD.

I had my brother let me borrow his PS2, put in the HDD and NA, and it worked fine. I bought his PS2 from him and it's working again.