Is HD a Bottleneck

[fallen2004]

I am running a P4 3.0 Ghz HT, 1.5gig ram and a X1950 but my PC seems slower at some tasks especially start-up, where it can take nearly 5 mins, than a 2.54 ghz celeron i have which only takes about 2 mins, they about the same start-up programs.

I was wondering if the HD could be slowing it down as ive heard that the speed does effect it. This is my HD Tune read read outs, what do you think, is the speed a problem?




Thx for any replys

 

[aevm]

I suspect you've got spyware, or a massively bloated registry, or a very fragmented file system. Either way it should not take 5 minutes. Try reinstalling Windows. Get an antivirus if you don't have one already.

Just to clarify: it used to boot a lot faster some time ago, right?

 

[fallen2004]

Yes abit, i was planning on reinstalling nxt week anyway, i was just checking as i dont want to reinstal then find out my HD was slowing the comp down and buy a new one and have 2 reinstal windows again

 

[aevm]

Check the SATA connections too. If they are loose you may get weird behavior.

 

[roadrunner197069]

Your harddrive score is bad!!!! In transfer rates and access time.

 

[fallen2004]

Ill give the inside n check the connects y im doin it

The comp is really old like 3-4 years so i didnt expect it to be good

Thx for the replys, think il reinstal windows, then if it aint much beter buy a new HD
Thx for the help

 

[JDocs]

To be honest, I have much newer drives and in comparison your drive speed seems OK. I think its spyware and a bloated registery as already suggested as opposed to hardware issues.

 

[Guest]

^ +1 ^

 

[roadrunner197069]

To be honest, I have much newer drives and in comparison your drive speed seems OK. I think its spyware and a bloated registery as already suggested as opposed to hardware issues.

well you bought something cheap, and slow then!!!!!! That speed sucks.

 

[geofelt]

See if you can activate the s.m.a.r.t hard drive capability. It keeps track of hard drive activity, including error recovery. Also, I think WD has some diagnostic programs that you can download and run. Hard drive error recovery will be transparent to you, but can really slow things down.

Otherwise, I would agree with aevm that you have some spyware or a corrupted system.

---good luck--

 

[evongugg]

@fallen2004:
Take a look at these charts for hard drive performance. You also have to take in consideration that you have an older processor, which makes a difference.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3-5-hard-drive-charts/Average-Read-Transfer-Performance,658.html

 

[geofelt]

HDtune/HDtach are synthetic benchmarks which have little relevance to what we really do with our PC every day. A more realistic series of tests comes from the www.storagereview.com performance database: The SR office Drivemark2006 is probably the most relevant:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

 

[aevm]

If the problem is just that the hard disk is old and slow, then buying a WD6400AAKS for $75 should help a lot. It's got about twice the average data rate shown in that HD Tune chart, and the access time is 5 times better.

However, I don't think booting should take 5 minutes even on a very bad disk, unless there's something else wrong. One of my old computers used to have a Pentium 3 and some 120GB Western Digital IDE disks, and it was still booting in less than two minutes.

It could be something as silly as too many Windows services. For example on my current computer (Q6600/4GB of RAM/XP/WD7500AAKS) the shutdown time went from about 15 seconds to about 2 minutes after I installed McAfee antivirus. It went back to 15 seconds after I configured the McAfee Framework service to start manually instead of automatically. I don't really need that thing running except when I want to update virus definitions anyway.