Win 7 - Core i7 but HD thrashing?

Tepid · 16 May 2010

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 · 17 May 2010

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 · 17 May 2010

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 · 17 May 2010

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 · 17 May 2010

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 · 17 May 2010

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 · 17 May 2010

Tepid said:

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