Hard drives feeling slow

seekdestroy

seekdestroy

seekdestroy

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9 Sep 2008
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Well, ive got 2 500gb samsung spinpoint HD502IJ, 1 has 2 partitions, 1 for Windows and programs, the second for games.
I noticed the computer has been booting slower and just running slowly in general, so i downloaded ATTO and did some benchmarks,
Now my C drive, is a 117 gb partition, and has 39% free space.
benchmarkCdrive.jpg


My D drive, is a 348gb partition, with 69% free space.
benchmarkDDrive.jpg


My X drive, is unpartitioned, only 6% free space.
benchmarkXdrive.jpg


The thing that i noticed is the D drive is 10mb/s slower than my C drive.
And my x drive is considerably slower than all the others. I defragment daily, and X drive is almost completely unfragmented. What affects their performance? Why am i seeing such a difference in speeds? (I don't know a lot about hard drives :P)
 
The differences in speed between C\: and D:\ is simply to do with C:\ being created on the fastest part of the HDD, ie. the beginning of it, where when it starts reading/writing it is fastest...

As regards why your comp. "appears" to be booting slower, have a look at the windows start up list to see how many programs/items are listed to start at boot, if there are any unnecessary ones simply remove them.

X:\ is probably reading/writing slower because it only has 6% free space.

Also, I think defragging every day is unnecessary, it may even have a derogative effect on a HDD/part's performance, once every 2-3 weeks would be better.
 
X: is due to been at the end of the disk (85MB/s going down to 60MB/s seems about right for an HDD)

get HD tach (if on vista or win7 run it in XP compatibility mode) and you see that your HDD is doing an Slope affect that all hdds do

only way to speed it up is remove stuff from start up,
Defrag but Not once per day you just brake the HDD (do it like 2-3 months or when system is fragmented)
an new HDD
an SSD as thay should not slow down (mine has not) Corsair S128 is not bad price about the same speed as your HDD in data rate speeds (but do not be Pulled into the High speed Constant rates that a lot of users seem to focus on to much SSDs are fast due to access times) but Random access it about 20-30x faster then your HDD and thats what makes HDDs slow and SSDs fast (should see an anti virus scans on SSDs just flys)
 
X drive is a completely separate hard drive with no partitions. Yeah theres not much on start up, my brother is saying how much slower my pc is at loading stuff up, we have the exact same HDD.
Yeah ive had my eye on SSD's for a while, but i don't have the money atm! :P plus im waiting for them to drop in price. I just wanted to see if there was anything that could be done to speed these drives up, maybe if i get some external storage, or a NAS ill format and raid 0.
 
Another thing that can add time to boot up is having a secondary (IDE) controller running which means the system has to start up something else; if enabled, try disabling it and see if that makes any difference.
 
have you installed the intel matrix software (get the up to date one from intels web site 2009 feb or higher) see if that improves any thing, it could be that Write caching is turned off
 
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