Advice with Harddrive Problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter ln
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L

ln

I've noticed a problem with my PC which is starting to annoy. It feels very
sluggish for certain tasks, yet seems fine for processor only tasks and
benchmarks. I'm hoping it's just a simple to fix problem, maybe the
harddrive.

Anway, I've googled for harddrive issues and I've checked DMA, checked for
spyware, defraged and made sure no unwanted processes are running with
'msconfig'. Still no joy (DMA is listed as "DMA if available" by the way)

I've downloaded and run HD Tach and to my very little knowledge it looks
very bad!
My Burst speed is 30.5 while the next one listed in the HD Tach benchmark,
ATA UltraDMA 6 is ~130MB/s
Seems to be a vast difference between the two? Is this expected from my
system, or should it be closer?

The other results were
CPU utilization 2%
Random Access 15.9ms
Average read 28.0MB/s

My PC
WIndows XP pro
AMD64 3000 764pin
MSI K8N neo (nForce3 250)
1GB PC3200
Western Digital 160GB IDE

Thanks
 
ln said:
I've noticed a problem with my PC which is starting to annoy. It feels very
sluggish for certain tasks, yet seems fine for processor only tasks and
benchmarks. I'm hoping it's just a simple to fix problem, maybe the
harddrive.

Anway, I've googled for harddrive issues and I've checked DMA, checked for
spyware, defraged and made sure no unwanted processes are running with
'msconfig'. Still no joy (DMA is listed as "DMA if available" by the way)

I've downloaded and run HD Tach and to my very little knowledge it looks
very bad!
My Burst speed is 30.5 while the next one listed in the HD Tach benchmark,
ATA UltraDMA 6 is ~130MB/s
Seems to be a vast difference between the two? Is this expected from my
system, or should it be closer?

The other results were
CPU utilization 2%
Random Access 15.9ms
Average read 28.0MB/s

My PC
WIndows XP pro
AMD64 3000 764pin
MSI K8N neo (nForce3 250)
1GB PC3200
Western Digital 160GB IDE

Thanks
Even WD Raptors don't get 70 MB/s so your hard drive is not that slow.
Exactly what things are feeling slow?

Marc
 
Even WD Raptors don't get 70 MB/s so your hard drive is not that slow.
Exactly what things are feeling slow?

Marc

Cheers for the reply Marc. If that's the case, I've probably over-assumed,
I had equated the ATA ULtraDMA benchmark with what I should be getting.

What feels slow is stuff like Outlook, and Firefox - instead of feeling
responsive, I'm getting pauses every now and then, and for example when
entering a search into google, it sometimes plays catch up with my
keystrokes.
It's nothing big, but it does get annoying after a while. I'll try and see
when these problems occur more often.

Thanks
 
ln said:
What feels slow is stuff like Outlook, and Firefox - instead of feeling
responsive, I'm getting pauses every now and then, and for example when
entering a search into google, it sometimes plays catch up with my
keystrokes.
It's nothing big, but it does get annoying after a while. I'll try and see
when these problems occur more often.

Thanks

I had expected answers like Photoshop, or some video editing program. If
these things are slow, the answer will be somewhere else. I recommend
two things:
1) Run an anti-spyware tool (MS or Hitman pro)
2) Make a ramdisk (for example with <a
href=http://tucows.com/preview/330411>this</a>, and install firefox on
it. Ramdisks are the fastest possible "harddisk", so if there still are
problems, they are not with the HDD.

Marc
 
I had expected answers like Photoshop, or some video editing program. If
these things are slow, the answer will be somewhere else. I recommend
two things:
1) Run an anti-spyware tool (MS or Hitman pro)
2) Make a ramdisk (for example with <a
href=http://tucows.com/preview/330411>this</a>, and install firefox on
it. Ramdisks are the fastest possible "harddisk", so if there still are
problems, they are not with the HDD.

Marc

Cheers for link Marc, I'll check out Ramdisk. Hopefully I find a clue from
there.
 
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