Laptop drive always on and seems slow

Dangerous_Dave · 5 Sep 2013 at 19:19

Hi all,

I have an ASUS UX32A here with the 500GB + 24GB hybrid drive. The 500GB HDD seems to be always on, and the computer is quite slow with it.

I tested it with CrystalDiskMark and this is what it came up with:

Does this seem normal?

Cheers

Dervious · 6 Sep 2013 at 00:18

Windows Vista ?

Dangerous_Dave · 6 Sep 2013 at 20:53

Windows 7

wazza300 · 6 Sep 2013 at 21:09

Look in power saving options in windows,look in advanced and tick the hdd power saving,it should spin down when idle,

Dervious · 7 Sep 2013 at 09:29

wazza300 said:
Look in power saving options in windows,look in advanced and tick the hdd power saving,it should spin down when idle,

I think there's more to it than that. The computer should not be slow with a hybrid drive. Even if HDD power saving is enabled, I doubt it will speed up the computer, and it may never go into power saving mode if something is keeping the drive busy.

Maybe there's a rogue app or a virus/malware infection that's causing the problem. A hardware fault can't be ruled out, but there are some things to check first.

I'd check out the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Delete). Goto the "performance" tab and click on "Resource Monitor". From there you can monitor CPU and Disk usage to see what might be causing the problem.

A full virus and malware scan might not be a bad idea either.

BTW. I'm not sue if the HDD in that laptop is a single hybrid drive, or a normal drive with a separate SSD used as cache. If the SSD is separate, maybe there's a driver or a setting that's causing the problem. I'm not familiar with this kind of setup, so maybe someone else can advise.

wazza300 · 7 Sep 2013 at 14:13

actually im not sure if it does power/spin down if its an os hdd?

my storage drives do as I hear them spin up when I access them