Really shoddy performance with decent specs

0rbytel said:

Ok, i've changed over the power and sata cables, and run a full HD diagnostic. It came up with 2 damaged blocks at .1% of the hd capacity.

Sounds like you need to do a low level format. If that don't do it you may need to return the hard drive, do an rma and get a new drive. If its less than 5 years old the drive should still be under warranty.

Thanks for your help guys. I'm waiting for an insurance claim to come through (we were flooded last week, and I lost a shed full of pc gear), so as soon as it comes through I think ill buy a couple of SSD drives. With the insurance money, i'll also be beefing up my ram, upgrading from an i5 to an i7 and buying another 5770 for crossfire.

I'll let you know how it all goes.

0rbytel said:

Thanks for your help guys. I'm waiting for an insurance claim to come through (we were flooded last week, and I lost a shed full of pc gear), so as soon as it comes through I think ill buy a couple of SSD drives. With the insurance money, i'll also be beefing up my ram, upgrading from an i5 to an i7 and buying another 5770 for crossfire.

I'll let you know how it all goes.

Sorry to hear about the disaster. Hope things work out for you. Best wishes :)

jasin said:

0rbytel said:

Ok, i've changed over the power and sata cables, and run a full HD diagnostic. It came up with 2 damaged blocks at .1% of the hd capacity.

Sounds like you need to do a low level format. If that don't do it you may need to return the hard drive, do an rma and get a new drive. If its less than 5 years old the drive should still be under warranty.

I agree there does seem to be a disk I/O problem. However, it's not always the disk that causes them. It could be a buggy driver or it could be the interface chip on the motherboard. One way to eliminate the driver issue would be to uninstall any third party SATA drivers (i.e. your disk controllers) and reboot to let the system reinstall them for you. This forces PNP detection which should allow the system to find the most suitable driver to install.

Thanks guys, I uninstalled the sata chipset drivers, and let them reinstall and after a reboot it is still running slow. I'm actually using MS drivers which are a few years old now, compared to the 3rd party ones which were from the end of last year.

I'm looking at either going SSD for my system drive, and then having a couple of sata 3gb/s 10000rpm for storage.

The drive i was looking at was the OCZ Vertex 60Gb, which is $300. I was looking at the samsungs, but they cost an arm and a leg.

Just out of curiousity- how comparable would the performance be (for a system drive) between say- 2x wd velociraptor 150GB 10000RPM/16MB/Sata2 drives running in RAID5, compared to the OCZ Vertex 60GB SSD 230/135, which are roughly the same price?

With those numbers you should be smokin

0rbytel said:

Thanks guys, I uninstalled the sata chipset drivers, and let them reinstall and after a reboot it is still running slow. I'm actually using MS drivers which are a few years old now, compared to the 3rd party ones which were from the end of last year.

Just out of curiosity... and because I know that simple oversights happen all the time... Do you have AHCI mode enabled in your BIOS?

Yes, I have AHCI enabled in the bios. Primarily because the bios either has IDE, RAID or AHCI.

I was having real issues with IDE, where W7 would freeze on boot, so I enabled AHCI. It boots fine now, but I do get the occasional BSOD and performance is slow. I don't understand why though, considering my WEI is high and all benchmarks are above average. It just seems to be the initial boot (takes a good 5-10 mins before I can do anything), and when I try and load programs everything is unresponsive for a good 15-20 seconds.

And just out of curiosity- would the SSD drive or the raid 2xvelociraptor 10K rpm drives be more beneficial cost and performance wise?

IDE works absolutly perfectly for me in RAID0. If you were having problems it wasn't Win 7 causing them with your IDE drive. The bad sectors on your HDD seems to be the real problem here. The rediculously slow loading times after start up and lag when starting up programs pretty much confirms that.