Western Digital Hard Drive is Slow- 2 minute boot times


  1. Posts : 9
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
       #1

    Western Digital Hard Drive is Slow- 2 minute boot times


    I recently got the hard drive in my Acer V3 laptop replaced since the first one had failed, and this new hard drive seems significantly slower than the old hard drive. The first hard drive was a Hitachi and was constantly getting anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds to boot to desktop, whereas this hard drive, a WDC WD7500BPVT, is taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to boot to desktop and then another 30 seconds to finish booting everything. Now this hard drive was a clean reinstall of Windows 7, so I don't understand why it's taking so long to boot. I only have about 80 GB on this 750 GB hard drive, and I don't have many programs running at startup either. Why is the old Hitachi beating this new replacement hard drive? They're both 5400 RPM 750 GB hard drives, with a SATA speed of 3 GB.
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  2. Posts : 1,379
    Win7 Pro 32-bit, Win8 Pro 32-bit
       #2

    Not good. Very slow drive can mean a failing drive. And yes, I know it's "new" -- but I had three WD drives fail me last year and one was only a few months old. If you can, go to the WD website, download their drive health checking utility (sorry, forgot the name) and run it on the drive. It's not destructive but it will check the health of the drive. IF it's only a few weeks old, and it's already failing, you should be able to get a replacement through the warranty for free.
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  3. Posts : 9
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #3

    I'm not sure if it's failing... I ran several hard drive tests including the built in Windows test and they all came back as "ok". When I check the event viewer I'm noticing a lot of drivers or services that are taking longer to boot than normal. Now I have been installing a lot of programs and updates lately so could that by chance have anything to do with it? Does the SuperFetch service need some time to optimize the boot process? Could it just be a matter of letting the PreFetch process optimize programs or what? I don't really want to have to get this hard drive replaced, since this is a hard drive replacement that Acer covered for me under warranty just a few days ago. They might be suspicious or annoyed if I send in my laptop again claiming that my hard drive is on the verge of failure, and unfortunately there's no way to prove that it is failing.
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  4. Posts : 50
    Windows 7 Home Premium
       #4

    Selereth said:
    Now I have been installing a lot of programs and updates lately so could that by chance have anything to do with it?
    That could have something to do with it. You can go to start > type in MSCONFIG and hit enter > click on the STARTUP tab and uncheck the programs that you don't want starting with the computer and it will speed it up some.


    Selereth said:
    Does the SuperFetch service need some time to optimize the boot process? Could it just be a matter of letting the PreFetch process optimize programs or what?
    Yes, prefetch does take up start-up time. I know that on an SSD they recommend disabling it altogether. I know this isn't an SSD, but you can disable it and see if it helps the bootup times by clicking start > type in SERVICES.MSC > go down to SUPERFETCH > right click on it and hit PROPERTIES > and change the startup type to DISABLED.

    Another thing to keep in mind is that 5400 RPM is about the slowest drive you can get. Yes, the SATA interface is 3GB/s, but that just means that the cable can transfer that much, not that it can read that fast from the disk drive. There is generally a correlation between drive RPMs and data transfer speed as you mentioned that the old one was 5400 RPM too, but this doesn't necessarily mean it's the exact same data transfer speed, just that the platters spin at that rate. If you'd like, you can do a test on each drive to measure data speed and compare the two to see if it's just a bunch of software clogging up the system, or if it's a hard drive speed issue.

    I use Crystal Disk Mark as a benchmarking tool. To give you an idea, I've posted a screenshot of my benchmark test with my drive.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Western Digital Hard Drive is Slow- 2 minute boot times-untitled.png  
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  5. Posts : 757
    Win10 Pro 64-bit
       #5

    On my fresh install, I found my boot times were taking 2minutes 39seconds to run until my PC was usable.
    There was also nothing at all in the Prefetch folder.
    It turned out that the Superfetch service had not been enabled for some reason by default.
    Changing the settings from Stopped and Manual to Started and Automatic populated my Prefetch folder, and after three days sped up my boot time from 2:39 to 1:05... with a spinner hard drive.
      My Computer


  6. Posts : 1,269
    Windows 7 Ultimate Retail Box (64-bit installed) + Service Pack 1
       #6

    I would install Soluto (soluto.com) and it will tell you loading times of everything, see if anything shows up outrageously slow in particular...

    Lots can be put on autoload with delay, experiment.

    5400 RPM drives are sllllllllllllllllllllllllllow to begin with, you handicapped it with an OS, how dare you!
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  7. Posts : 9
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #7

    Don't you need a copy of the OS to install on an SSD though? And my boot times have improved considerably since I first reinstalled all my programs, so I think it was just Prefetch needing to adapt my boot time.

    If there's a way to reinstall Windows on an SSD I'll gladly go out and buy one, except I'll also need a hard drive bracket because my laptop has two hard drive bays but it only came with one hard drive bracket.
      My Computer


  8. Posts : 1,269
    Windows 7 Ultimate Retail Box (64-bit installed) + Service Pack 1
       #8

    You could move the current OS over to the SSD once connected:

    SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System

    I would still try that Soluto app I suggested for the load times info.
      My Computer


 

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