windows unresponsive and slow while disk activity

The problem is still there, it's not fixed yet....
use Seagate's SeaTools and there is no error...
the western digital align utility is for those migrating from windows xp only right?...any1 have other idea on how to fix this?...

stevena1991 said:

The problem is still there, it's not fixed yet....
use Seagate's SeaTools and there is no error...
the western digital align utility is for those migrating from windows xp only right?...any1 have other idea on how to fix this?...

No, the WD align utility is for Windows XP as well as if you cloned an older disk with Windows Vista or Windows 7 on it to a new WD disk. That's what I did (cloned older WD disk to a new 1TB one). Since Windows was originally installed with the 512b standard, it doesn't match up with the 4kb sectors. The utility fixes that, if you have a new WD disk that is.

howetechnical said:

stevena1991 said:

The problem is still there, it's not fixed yet....
use Seagate's SeaTools and there is no error...
the western digital align utility is for those migrating from windows xp only right?...any1 have other idea on how to fix this?...

No, the WD align utility is for Windows XP as well as if you cloned an older disk with Windows Vista or Windows 7 on it to a new WD disk. That's what I did (cloned older WD disk to a new 1TB one). Since Windows was originally installed with the 512b standard, it doesn't match up with the 4kb sectors. The utility fixes that, if you have a new WD disk that is.

Do i need to use this?as i got this laptop with windows vista installed...cause seems that the disk will be formatted if i used it...

I'm curious about this too.
Disk activity almost freezes everything else. This is with write-caching enabled.
It happens on both on my XP SP3 and Win7 x64 laptops.
My desktop on the other hand, with an old Pentium 4 chip in it, has no problems at all multitasking.

I think the problem might have to do with the lower speed/cache of the laptop drives (like the ones in my machines).
It could also be the lack of hyperthreading in most of the laptops available. No idea why the BIOS disables it (with no option to re-enable it).

Jonathan_King said:

Try switching your SATA setting in your BIOS to AHCI. Be sure to read this first: AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

it's on ahci already, what's ide?...anything else you can think of?...

Stevena, per your earlier post, not the WD align utility does not format your drive. When you use it, it tells you that it's a non destructive utility (unless your system loses power, then you lose everything unless you can recover the data).

Lets go this way, what drive -did- you have, with what OS, and what drive do you have -now-, and did you do a full reformat and re-install on the new drive or clone the old one over?

howetechnical said:

Stevena, per your earlier post, not the WD align utility does not format your drive. When you use it, it tells you that it's a non destructive utility (unless your system loses power, then you lose everything unless you can recover the data).

Lets go this way, what drive -did- you have, with what OS, and what drive do you have -now-, and did you do a full reformat and re-install on the new drive or clone the old one over?

i have a wd scorpio blue 500gb (WD5000BEVT) with windows 7 professional 64bit...As i have partition on my drive, i do full reformat on the system partition only, and do a clean install...

I had the exact same problem after a clean install. The answer for me was that the SATA IDE setting in Bios needed to be set to 'AHCI' not 'SATA'. However before changing the Bios I had to first change a setting in the Windows 7 Registry. The setting was under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES, System, Current Control Set, Services, Msahci. The value of the item 'START' had to be modified to '0'. Then I could restart the computer and alter the Bios Setting. The use of AHCI for Hard Drives seems to be a Windows 7 requirement.