Slow hard drive

Technology and Gaming Help and Support
#1

Long story short: My hard drive seems to be writing data at about 1.5MB/s; it starts a transfer at a normal speed, but after 2 or 3 seconds, it stops and continues at that ridiculous slow speed.

I don’t understand what’s happening here… I’ll explain in chronological order what I did:

-I bought a Western Digital 1.5TB Caviar Green EARS internal SATA hard drive
-I formatted it (from windows XP) in NTFS
-According to many sources, that drive requires some utility to ‘align the partition’ to make it work at a proper speed when formatted from XP. Something about ‘Advanced Format’… So I did that, and it said it was already aligned correctly.

So at that point I have 1 older WD 250GB drive as a main partition, and this new drive as a secondary logical partition, and everything seems to be working fine.
-I move my backup stuff to the new drive, format my old drive and install Windows 7.
-Windows 7 is installed, everything works fine. The Win7 performance index gives me 5.5 for my main hard drive (the 250GB one). Cool.

Then I notice that transfers between the 2 drives are terribly slow. At first I thought it was my 1.5TB drive, because of all the bad reviews I read, but I presumed that these reviewers didn’t do the align partition thing. So I test a bunch of things, swap the SATA cables for my 2 drives, swap their connection port to the motherboard… etc…
Not sure what I did, but now, it’s only my main 250GB drive that is slow in writing speed, no matter which cable/port combination I use. It’s so slow, in fact, that I can’t even get the performance index to be tested again. It aborts during the hard drive performance test because it takes too long.

When a large file is being written to this drive, everything hangs up, even though the CPU usage is very low. Everything takes like 5 minutes to respond. For example if I try to start Minesweeper during such a transfer, it might start like 10 minutes later, without exaggeration.

So the two weird things are:
-Not sure what is wrong, since the performance index tested fine on the main drive at first but transfers were slow, then it seems like the main drive is the problem…
-Transfers start fine for about 2 seconds, then hang up. I can transfer a 150MB file in 2 or 3 seconds, but a 1GB file can take 20 minutes.

Things tried already:
-It’s not a fragmentation issue (0% fragmented)
-I ran a checkdisk and no errors were found on either drives
-The 250GB is also slow when booting without the other drive

#2

You may have a lemon.
Larger single HDDs tend to be slower…if you happen to have the cash, buy a couple more of those and set up a RAID 0 stripe array, that’d be your cheapest option, but if you want zomgwtfbbq fast, go RAID 5 or RAID 10.

#3

Ugh I hate when that happens, your SATA hdd could be incompatible with the SATA controller, or it might need a firmware upgrade… Honestly I would just format it with a few different tools and if there’s no change I would return it and buy a different model.

#4

erm… it happens to be my OLD drive that is slow for some reason, and it worked fine before :o
I would reformat the new drive with Windows 7 as suggested by the manufacturer (see: Advanced Format), but that would mean transferring about 100GB of stuff… At 1MB/s, it would take a couple of weeks. No thanks :stuck_out_tongue:

I was wondering about the firmware though… You’re talking about the SATA controller’s firmware, or the HDD’s itself? I tried searching for updates on that stuff, but couldn’t find anything.

#5

I think your problem is not so much big that you can’t solve them. Actually you have problem in transfer and basically it is called explorer problem in technical language. So when you are transfer something, just try to close all the extra process from the task manager by ctrl + alt + del.

#6

I always have the problem where it starts writing fast but then slows down dramatically over time, although it doesn’t go as low as 1.5 mb/s.

#7

Get a Solid State drive, all your speed problems will be solved. :stuck_out_tongue:

[color=black]You may start having money problems though!

#8

I have gained a lot of interest in SSD’s lately, writing and reading files with speeds over 200mb/s - that’s just amazing. They are very expensive though, they have low capacity and apparently they lose some of their speed over time.

#9

Yea, and also they have the propensity for fragmentation as well, not that that cannot be solved.

But 200mb/s… :stuck_out_tongue:

#10

I’ve actually seen several SSD’s that can read and write files at 275mb/s - but like I said it’s capacity is very low (50 Gb) and it costs four times as much as a regular HDD.

#11

Hmmm, as I said, the CPU usage during the transfer is very low, but the whole system still seems to hang. It doesn’t seem to matter if any other processes are running. I even tried disabling the resident shield on my antivirus in case it was trying to scan every chunk of data being written (which it most likely does, but doesn’t affect transfer rate at all).

For now I can live with it, I just have to install games and stuff on my D drive, which will probably less of a hassle in the end anyway… Not like I’ll fill 1.5TB anytime soon.
I’ll probably buy some parts (case + power supply + motherboard + CPU) to complete a second computer, with all the parts I replaced over time. I’ll probably just get a better hard drive then.

Thanks for the ideas… keep them coming if you think of another possible problem source :slight_smile:

Holy crap, there are SSD’s at over 1000$ in the 250-512GB range… :S

Also… why the hell can’t we test components individually in the Windows 7 performance rating thing?

EDIT: Annoying side effect: hibernate takes a couple of minutes… and coming back from it as well

#12

Hard drives have very slow data transfer rates compared to other types of memory.

The fastest of all that you can use to load your system is a SSD… but don’t do what I did and try the cheapest one out there or just any brand name. I have found (after wasting too much money) that the Intel X25-M MLC line of SSD’s is by far the fastest of them all. Any will give you something in the mid 7’s for a data transfer rating in the windows performance index but the 80GB from what I have heard from friends is the fastest. Many have gotten a 7.7 or even a 7.8 with that specific one. I use a 120GB and I get 7.6 which isn’t bad. I would imagine that other factors such as bus speed on your MB may affect this number but the Intel SSD was the fastest type of “disk drive” of them all.

The two I mentioned run around $200 give or take. The 120GB is plenty to run your system with including all of your software and bunches of movies etc. Get a big HDD for storage and you are all set.

#13

Nice bump.

Your post is also off topic, since the speeds I mentioned are way under standards even for the “slow” hard disk drives.

But I did get a SSD, but not because of this issue.

By the way, it turned out the hard drive was indeed failing. It was getting lots of bad sectors, and the auto-recover thingy was slowing it up badly.

It was still under warranty, so all is well.

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