Windows 7: Win 7 - Core i7 but HD thrashing?

Hi All,

Weird situation and wondered what advice people might have. I recently upgraded this whole system to one that should scream - Core i7 920, 6 GB triple channel RAM, Nvidia GTS 250 and Gigabyte UD-3R m'board.

Anyway, it was running great but now, if I do ANY sort of large copy or use a prog that accesses the hard drive heavily, the entire system becomes near unusuable. I.e. say I'm copying a 2GB file - during that time, programs barely load, everything is very laggy and its hard to use anything.

The harddrive is fairly new - no more than a year old, Samsung HD103UJ (1TB 7200 RPM 32MB) so it shouldn't be so slow as to stop other stuff to such a degree.

Any ideas? Would appreciate any help!


Cheers
Andrew

You need to run HDD Diags and Memory Diags. See Here

Hardware can go bad at anytime.

I suggest you go to Resource Manager > Disk tab during the 2GB copy and check how busy your disk is. If it is saturated (especially with a disk to disk copy on the same drive), then your system will stall. All the high end other gear will not help when the disk is the bottleneck. The situation could be somewhat improved with 2 disks copying from one to the other - if the disk controller does not become the bottleneck.

Well,, not saying you are wrong,, but I am skeptical that that is the problem here.
it might be, if the drive is bad, or the mobo is bad, possible bad cable or ports to/from the HDD?, otherwise,, that system, should not be stalling out. Regardless if it is one disk or 2.

I'm calling this a failure somewhere,, but it's not with the items chosen,, just a software/driver/hardware failure somewhere.

Hi, thanks for the replies.

whs - Yes you're right, it is saturated when copying from partition to partition on the same disk, for prob 15 seconds and then reduced to about 75% load but still things were quite unresponsive.

I totally get what you mean re the HD is the botteneck - what I'd want to know is, could I upgrade to another and prevent this? At the moment there are two 480GB partitions (for C and D) - could the size of them be contributing to it?

I was considering upgrading to a 2TB, but wasn't sure what I'd need to check to make sure the same thing didnt happen with it re saturating and then effectively stalling. Its never happened with any previous harddrive, and they were all much slower than this 1TB one.


Thanks,
Andrre

I have almost exactly the same configuration as you, although I have a Western Digital drive rather than a samsung, otherwise nearly identical.

I'm not seeing the problems you are. My system screams. Copying files does slow down some functions a bit, but nothing i'd call serious. That's just to be expected as things like swap file access can be a problem.

I did recently notice that WmiPrvSe.exe was using a huge amount of memory if I left the system running for a while, and this appeared to affect performance. Turned out it was a bug and there's a hotfix available, but the bug only shows up on systems that use a lot of WMI counters (such as if you have SQL Server installed). After applying the hotfix, the problem went away.

One thing, I put my hard disk on the SATA3 connector rather than the SATA2 connectors.

aheyn,

Try using teracopy to copy files.

Ran the Samsung HD utility and it said no problems found, all tests were ok. Also ran memtest just to be sure, both tests took hours but came out fine.

When upgrading, what would I need to look for so it wouldn't be like this? (like, the 1TB currently is 7200 rpm, 32MB) .. I think the 2TB are also 32MB buffer, so would it be different?

Is the size of partitions an issue? (currently 480gb each)?

I would keep the 1TB for storage and get an SSD for the OS and programs. Yes they can be a little pricey, but you will see a major difference in speed. If you get one around 80GB for your OS and installed programs or games then you won't have to spend a fortune. Make sure you get one that supports the TRIM command and read some reviews and figure out which SSD will give you the best bang for your buck. Some are faster than others, but you may not need the fastest one out there. I doubt that moving to a larger drive is going to help much unless the drive you have is full or is bad. Moving parts drives are all about the same and performance is hardly noticeable unless you get a velociraptor, but if you are going to spend that kind of money you might as well get a SSD.

1. What is really strange is that you still have 75% disk traffic after the big copy operation. That is not normal. Check in Resource Monitor which processes are creating that kind of traffic.

2. A 2TB disk will not help. A larger disk is potentially slower.

3. The suggestion regarding an SSD is very good. A high end system like yours merits an SSD which would have a major positive impact on performance. A 60GB SSD would be ample. If you want to explore that, let me know and I will advise you how to proceed and what to buy and where to buy.