HDD slow access

My PC seems to be suffering from slow disk access and I need help in figuring out why. It results in extremely slow loading times compared to the similar harddrivers in other PC's as well as some stuttering in certain games. I don't believe the hard disk itself is failing as I haven't seen any bad sectors or blue screens or any other abnormal behavior.

I've tried running HDTune on it but it "seems" normal, however if I tried to open a folder during the test i'd get really poor performance, usually poor performance requires some serious disk work rather than just opening a folder right ?

I've attached a pic of the hd test under no load conditions

 

oops, forgot to mention that I get 100% disk queue time

p.s: where did the edit button go ?

 

There are a lot of things that can cause poor performance.

What Operating System are you running and do you know the make and model of the HDD?

Has the HDD been compressed??

How long has it been since a defrag?

Crystal Disk Info will give you a look at the S.M.A.R.T log of the drive.

The edit button goes away about 10 minutes after you make a post.

 

I'm running windows xp x64, the make & model was included in the screenshot i posted, Western Digital WD5000AACS-00G8B and its not been compressed. Its been partitioned in 2 drives, one with the OS on it, at 15 GB and the rest in the 2nd drive. I've done a recent defrag however as the drive is fairly full, the empty diskspace is well below the amount required to run an efficient defrag so I'm not quite sure how well it worked out. The SMART status appeared fine according to HDTune, or would you rather I test with crystal disk info ?

I don't know if its a fragmentation problem or something else (I believe its something else), I have another drive with the exact same model, under the same conditions thats functioning much better. This system has showed gradual signs of slowness during loading times, however there are no other signs of hardware failure. Copying data speeds are quite decent and regular operations seem normal, however it tends to slow to a crawl when alot of disk access is queued up. Specially when starting up a game/application or closing it down.

 

Give Crystal Disk Info a try. It's a very small free standing program so it doesn't install. It list a lot information about the HDD.

It's rare but possible that the cache is failing on the drive. I'm not sure if Disk Info will show that or not.

 

That sounds to me that your disk is already doing things; or you may have a page file problem. Umm, got a couple ideas, but do me a favor:

1) Post a pic of your partition tables.
a) Click Start
b) Right click Computer
c) Click Manage
d) Go to Disc (Disk) Management
e) You should have a screen that shows your partition/volume tables.
*PS: It's been a while since I used XP an alternative method to getting to Disk Management would be to click Start, point to Run, type diskmgmt.msc, and then click OK

2) I would like to know how much RAM you have and how big your Page File is. If you don't know where to see how big your Page File is, here is where to look.
a) Open System in Control Panel.
b) On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
c) On the Advanced tab, under Virtual memory, click Change.
d) Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change. (This should be your C: drive but one can never be too sure. )

Fill me in, and I'll see what I can do on my end.

With regards,
-X

 

Yeah thats what I suspect, I think the reason it stutters during games and at start/end of applications is when it tries using the pagefile to load/unload stuff. Since there is something slowing down HDD access, it has a ripple effect creating a bottleneck which I'm seeking to resolve. The system is still perfectly usable, I would just prefer to resolve the longer than usual load times.

I've attached a pic as requested, drive C is actually 10GB. My ram is 2GB and my pagefile is 4GB, placed on drive E. I believe this is actually a software issue rather than a hardware failure but I'm not 100% certain. I had tried recreating the pagefile a few weeks ago but that didn't seem to help, I'm gonna try doing that again now anyways just to be sure.

My problem is HDTune doesn't seem to be showing any real slowdown according to its final test results, however as you can see from the graph there is alot of jittery up/down during the test. I've tried crystal disk info and it shows disk health as good, temp as 41.

 

bump

Additionally it seems any slight loading from other applications seems to have a knock on effect on drive speed, despite very light CPU usage.

 

I see 2 problems; free space on C: partition is way too low + page file is on D: partition. This causes a lot of unnecessary work for the drive and for NTFS logging.

You need to free up space on the C: partitition - 55% free will enable you to move the swapfile into it with enough free space left to defrag - just! You really should be thinking about a fresh install, set the C: partition to 20 - 80GB, depending on how much time you have to devote to keeping it clean. Install Windows, your game(s) and the paging file into the first partition, My Documents and the other 'special' folders can all be moved to the 2nd partition.

3rd problem - 2GB of RAM and x64 Windows?!

 

yeah I lost a 2gb ram stick and haven't replaced it yet. Whats wrong with the pagefile being on drive D (or E) exactly ? I do this on almost all my PCs and don't notice any illeffects. All my games are also on the second drive, I keep C just for windows. How does an extra 10GB free help if its not being used ?

I would rather not reinstall the OS just for the sake of it, this system has alot of installed games and stuff, extracting all the little things that go into drive C like game saves and such as well as the registry for backing up would be a nightmare and I'd probably lose some in the process

 

True story.

However, 10 GB for a Windows 7 installation is kinda cutting it. I normally stick with 20 GB and that's still borderline. A good amount of space is 30 GB. More over, Take a look at this. It shows the minimum space requirements for a 32bit Win 7 and a 64bit Win 7 install.

Your Pagefile being on the D drive shouldn't be an issue. Granted, if it is the D DRIVE, looking at it now, the logical slice known as the D: partition will cause higher NTFS logging. The general rule is that the pagefile should be on the most active partition of the least busy hard drive. It should be on the most active partition because that is where the drive heads will be most often. This minimizes head seek time, the #1 factor in disk performance. It should be on the least busy drive because this will minimize competition with other disk access; because you are placing it in a separate partition than the OS; you are increasing your seek and read times for your HDD. (It has to go to a different sector/header to read the pagefile.sys and then go to which ever applications you have running AND your OS.)


A couple things to keep in mind:

As you install more and more things to your computer. Your C:/Windows/System32 folder and your C:/Windows will get larger due to random files needed for applications being placed within.

Temp files are also stored on the System Partition.

Restore Points (and Shadow Copies) are also stored on the System Partition.

Any updates (and installers for them) are also stored on the System Partition.

(There are other things I can not fully recall yet. This is just a few bigger items)

So with ALL said; My recommendation is similar to satrow's.

Backup your registry by following these steps.
Backup your computer following these steps.

The top two are for safety reasons. The real trick you'll be doing is this. This method is actually faster; leaving you only with drivers to be updated. The top two safety precautions aren't exactly needed but highly recommended. Also, if you can give me your system specs. I'll see how reliable sysprep would be with your system.

FYI: You are doing METHOD THREE of that tutorial and I would recommend you go through with this otherwise you may experience some serious disc thrashing and lose a hard drive sometime after it's 3rd year give or take a few months. (Depending on how often you use it, how often you defrag and other various conditions)

PS: This explains your "100% Disk Queue time"

-X

 

I think #11 sums it up pretty well for me too

You might consider buying a 4/8GB USB pendrive fast enough to be dedicated to ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost has nothing to do with RAM (even though it can bring a small speed boost to computers with slower hard drives).

ReadyBoost duplicates many of the smaller files already in the page file and copies them onto the USB drive. When any data from the page file is called for, Windows pulls it from the fastest source. As the access time on a flash drive is so fast for small, non-consecutive files, it allows the main page file (and the IDE/SATA channels) free to load the larger and consecutive files.

It rarely gives a noticeable boost to anything though, it's subtle, like a 0.5 - 7% speedup in loading a program as most of the heavy work is still done by the page file.

 

ReadyBoost! That's something I never seen before!

Another thing you may want to consider is simply buying a 20-30 GB SSD drive. Those things have intensely fast read/write/seek times. Setting up that drive for JUST the OS and the pagefile will make your disc read times on your current HDD considerably lower. (and make a huge difference when booting applications)

Just another idea since we are throwin them out there. I, personally, buy a new SSD for any computer I own. (I own 3 atm) and am so happy I do.

 

Unfortunately I'm running windows xp x64 so those commands aren't available for me, and xp tends to have a much lower space requirement btw, hence the small C drive. The reason I don't believe its a pagefile issue, or even an OS issue is the results from HDTune , they're supposed to be disk-wide and not just partition specific. As you can see, when nothing else is supposed to be running, disk access is fluctuating wildly, this doesn't happen on other PC's, some fluctuating is to be expected but I think there is something else thats causing this, beyond the pagefile. I'm gonna try moving the pagefile back to drive C just to make sure but I doubt that'll be the cause.

Is there some way to figure out which applications are responsible for the most hd access and attempt to benchmark their usage somehow ? I've attached another benchmark right after I booted the OS and waited for everything to load, I'm guessing something else was loading in the background but I was never able to find out what it was since CPU usage was under 5% at the time, perhaps the AV? I'm thinking I've got something running thats hogging the harddrive somehow, I'm quite sure the system is infection/virus free though. Or perhaps the drive controller ?

P.S: Btw, I've got my PC back up to 4gb ram now and I've also tried replacing the sata cable and the slot as well as cleaning out all the dust.

 

Agreed, XP does have a small footprint but the x64 has a larger one than x86.

Your C: partition shows 685MB free out of the 10GB, defrag requires 12% free space = 1.2GB, add your page file to that (say 1GB for testing, now that you have your full 4GB RAM back) and you need to find 2.2GB free space. Then fully defrag it before moving the page file.

Once the page file is in place, use PageDefrag to ensure it's in one piece.

Actually, since many of the tools you'll need to use are included in it (inc. the above and Diskmon and the others suggested by plodr), you ought to consider downloading the full Sysinternals suite.

 

thanks, I'll give it a shot and report back after I've done some further diagnostics, unfortunately I can't download anything too large atm due to ISP issues but I'll keep it in mind when my connection is fixed.

 

You should try Scanning, Cleaning up and Defragmenting your Hard Drives which may work..