Win 7 - Core i7 but HD thrashing?

[aheyn]

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

 

[Tepid]

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

Hardware can go bad at anytime.

 

[whs]

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.

 

[Tepid]

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.

 

[aheyn]

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

 

[Mystere]

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.

 

[Bill2]

aheyn,

Try using teracopy to copy files.

 

[aheyn]

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)?

 

[housry23]

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.

 

[whs]

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.

 

[Tepid]

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.

I am just going to say that this is not a bottleneck issue. This is a real problem somewhere. This is not due to the hardware used, but an actual problem with either hardware or software or OS.

With that said, yeah, It may be that using an SSD Might resolve the issue. And maybe it won't, if there is a real issue with the OS, Drivers, Software, some other peice of Hardware. But there is still an issue that is not caused by bottlenecking of the model of hard drive used. Not one that would create the senerio explained above..

Or maybe I should say,,, the speed of that drive should not be causing this issue.
But, the Samsung HDD could be the issue I guess. But it would in my opinion be, that particualr HDD, not the line of them.

 

[aheyn]

Thanks for everyones help.

I've run the Samsung HD program from DOS and it took a good 3 hours to analyse the HD, including a full sector scan and everything passed fine, no problems detected. Also checked ram with memtest, again took hours but came up clear.

Could anyone recommend any other progs I could use to try and diagnose what it might be?

From memory, I didnt have the issue as I upgraded (Win 7 was installed on the hard drive beforehand). BUT, I am 100% sure that in the past this slowing down when copying big files has never happened, and those hard drives would have been much slower and smaller capacity.

Could it be a BIOS issue? Havent had any problems as such though.

Any other ideas of tests I can run to try and further narrow it down?

Thanks!

 

[Mystere]

Have you tried moving the drive to the SATA3 port on your motherboard? As I mentioned, that's one difference between our setup.

Also, consider disabling the Superfetch service. This could be conflicting with your copy operations.

Also, I just realized, I have enabled AHCI mode in the BIOS, and installed the AHCI driver. AHCI enables things like Native Command Queing, which improves interactive disk performance.

Enabling AHCI after the fact has some issues though, there's workarounds, but I don't remember what they are offhand.

 

[zzz2496]

Is this one single file 2GB in size? Or it's a bunch of small files totaling 2GB? Copying from partition to another partition on the same disk is bad, add to that -> copy a lot of small files, it'll bring your system to it's knees... No cheap storage system like small file writes (even SSD doesn't like it), expensive storage systems have many large cache and buffers to overcome this issue.

zzz2496

 

[aheyn]

Its a one file 2GB - I could be copying any file, but just mentioned it as its large and any large file will cause this (even a like 900 MB file would also).

I'll check re the SATA3 ports, I'm almost 100% sure the port its connected to is a SATA3 port on the gigabyte ud-3R but will check to be sure. Will also try disabling superfetch and enabling AHCI (if not already). Thanks for the help, will let u guys know of the outcome.

Like I said, in the past this has never happened - I could copy a 2GB file and the comp wouldnt bring the system to its knees at all, much less than this (and that was a much slower system and smaller, slower HD).

 

[Tepid]

Copying from partition to another partition on the same disk is bad, add to that -> copy a lot of small files, it'll bring your system to it's knees.

I'm sorry,, but no it doesnt. I work with large files in excess of 11G Video files as well as smaller files. Transferring from partition to partition on a single drive or seperate drive sas never, not one time ever brought my system to it's knees, and I am no long running Raid 0 Stripe. So, check my specs and you will see. Also, do not have this issue on my new laptop, specced below.

If you are having these issue, I can assure you, you have issues that should not be happening.

Unfortunately, I do not have any answers for the OP.

 

[zzz2496]

Copying from partition to another partition on the same disk is bad, add to that -> copy a lot of small files, it'll bring your system to it's knees.

I'm sorry,, but no it doesnt. I work with large files in excess of 11G Video files as well as smaller files. Transferring from partition to partition on a single drive or seperate drive sas never, not one time ever brought my system to it's knees, and I am no long running Raid 0 Stripe. So, check my specs and you will see. Also, do not have this issue on my new laptop, specced below.

If you are having these issue, I can assure you, you have issues that should not be happening.

Unfortunately, I do not have any answers for the OP.

I don't know about you, I have 1TB WDC Caviar Green for system use, spliced to 2 partition (150GB Win partition/ The rest for data), whenever Windows backup fired up, it's starts copying data from 1TB green to 1TB WDC Caviar Black (as you can see, my system is no slouch either). In performance monitor, I can see that I have 8-13 disk queue on both disks, transfer rate running at around 40-70MB/s, and my Windows response time dipped to a grinding halt speed... Things goes differently if I plug my Seagate 15K SAS disk (with adaptec controller), backup/restore is nothing for that disk... Average disk queue is around 25 for that drive before it starts to slow down a bit (2 heads really helps a lot). I work with many very large uncompressed video files (~7GB), disk images, iso images, thousands of small web scripts + jpeg files (a mirror of my internal portal).

Anyways, I can claim something, you can claim something, we have completely different systems. I can't really argue about it, but the fact still stands, SATA disks aren't really that fast, but it shouldn't bring our OP's system to grinding halt speed. I agree, there's something wrong with the OP's system - we are looking for that, right? I have my ideas, you have yours, let's combine them to help the OP .

zzz2496