Super slow HDD on X58 Sabertooth?

[klippenwald]

System Info:

Win 7 64-bit
i7 970 3.20GHz
WDC 1001FALS 1TB 3.0GBs/s
24 GB GSkill mem
ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366

Problem:

Terrible HDD performance.

This is supposed to be a 3.0 GBs/s HDD, but it takes at least 60 seconds to boot Win 7 from the splash screen. Takes 1.5-2 minutes to load BF3 and another 2-3 minutes sometimes to load a single map, for example. You can see from the above speed test that the performance is not up to par.

I have the BIOS RAID Marvell controller disabled and AHCI enabled.

What else can I do? What else should I look for to ensure things are working right? This is a relatively new build and quite stable otherwise.

Thanks for any help and suggestions.

 

[CaedenV]

60sec into windows is not necessarily terrible depending on how many background programs you have running, but I agree that the rest seems ridiculously long.
If this is a new drive I would RMA it. But first, go scrounge up a simply 80GB drive, install windows, and see if that fixes the issue, there is always the possibility that it is an issue with your RAM, mobo, or processor (though the HDD seems most likely). Also, use your antivirus/antimalware to see if something is artificially slowing things down.

 

[GhislainG]

You can see from the above speed test that the performance is not up to par.

What isn't up to par? I tested that utility on a WD5001AALS which isn't my boot drive and, as expected, my results are worse than yours. The results on the boot disk which is a Seagate ST3649323AS are just slightly better, but they are lower than yours. I also tested a couple WD Blacks on another system and none is as fast as yours. The results of Roadkil's Disk Speed are a bit weird when you look at the random 16K blocks and higher transfer rates.

Other than a clean OS, what else is running on your system that could affect loading applications?

 

[klippenwald]

I'm shocked that others are getting equal or worse performance. What happened was that my previous motherboard failed, and that was only a quad core with 4 GB memory, it loaded Win 7 from the POST to logged in in the same amount of time, and that includes a trip though GRUB.

I don't have a lot that loads on startup, in fact I cleaned some out to see if it would help. I've checked the process manager to see if something was consuming CPU cycles (on a 6 core, right?), but less than 5% is in use for all processes. Not even my AV process shows more than 1% use.

I'm not worried about block rates, just overall performance.

The HDD light is on steadily, which leads me to believe that the data transfer rate is the bottleneck.

 

[GhislainG]

What performance do you get with CrystalDiskMark? An SSD would be a lot quicker.

 

[klippenwald]

Sure, an SSD would be lovely, if you have a 1TB SSD laying around for a hundred bucks I'll take i

 

[GhislainG]

Performance of the C: drive is excellent because you partitoned the hard disk (it's almost twice as fast as mine). In your original post, you never mentioned that the drive was partitioned. How many partitions did you create?

 

[klippenwald]

Four.

248 on paper, but actual performance varies. I don't think this is an accurate indicator of a real life situation. I noted that while I ran CDM and touched nothing on the computer the performance was as shown; however, when I opened Firefox with the test running the performance plummeted to 10 MBs/s. I know drive performance goes down when accessing different partitions but I didn't think it would be that bad. I think I might need to get a small drive and put the only the OS on that.

Anybody know an easy way to move an OS? What a PITA to have to reinstall everything. . Oh well, a clean install wouldn't hurt.

 

[GhislainG]

I know that people partition hard disks, but I honestly don't understand why. Using multiple hard disks provides better performance. A hard disk that isn't partitioned will usually be faster because the heads don't have to move as much.

Moving an OS isn't that difficult. Look into Acronis Home and other similar backup solutions.

 

[klippenwald]

I have acronis home. Are you suggesting simply backing up the OS and then placing it on a new drive by way of the backup?

 

[klippenwald]

I have acronis home. Are you suggesting simply backing up the OS and then placing it on a new drive by way of the backup?

 

[GhislainG]

You could backup and restore. You could also try Acronis Migrate Easy (free for 15 days) to copy the OS to a new hard disk. Both solutions should work.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/

 

[Makinbacon]

Just throwing this out there. Many people don't defrag their HDD's anymore. When data gets scattered across the disk this randomizes the free space as well as the data. If its more that 10% fragmented you could get a noticable increase in performance by defragging. I have seen it bad before more than 50%. I use auslogics. Also you need to make sure your using sata 3 cables to connect your drive to a sata 3 port. I don't take you for an idiot you seem to know what your doing. If you really want a cheaper, better performing solution use RAID-0. Want redundancy? Raid-5 but you need TLER drives for RAID-5. I run raid 0(3-750g WD Blacks) and play COD-BO and MW3 I am almost always the first one in the game. For start up speeds. May be a registry issue('s). If you have a reg cleaner you trust fine i use CCleaner. I have had reg cleaners screw up my registry so bad i had to reinstall. Good luck.

 

[Makinbacon]

HDD cache makes a big difference as well. when buying a HDD get the biggest cache u can. With RAID try to match the drives. you want all the same model for best performance. RAID-0 minimum of 2 disks RAID-5 minimum of 3. Sorry trying to keep my posts as small as possible.

 

[klippenwald]

Defragged weekly. I'm probably going to get a small drive and shift the OS over to that, and have ONLY the OS on it. Step after that is RAID 1 or 10 for the rest.

GhislainG, thanks for the tip about Acronis. I already use the backup software, so I'll give migrate a try when I get the drives lined up (when prices come down from the ridiculously false high prices of late).