Question Terribly slow Windows, but SMART is OK for HDD and trasfer speeds are fast ?

[TechDave]

Hi,

First time ever i post a question. (normally i find my answers always with a good search and/or read-up/study)
But for the moment i have myself a bit of a conundrum with an HDD or Windows.

I have this older system intel core2quad q9750 with windows (tried 7 and 10) which is terrible slow in boot and operating whenever it is writing/reading the disk.
Whenever the system is operating slow, the C-drive disappears out of the disk list in RESOURCE MONITOR and only comes back after a couple reboots.

SMART is ok, no errors.
Transferspeed when coying files to and from the C-drive are all at normal speed. (lots of small files or big file) (Explorer or 3rde party program is Owner of the copy process)
No virus in windows, already tried with fresh install (both with standard windows drivers and updated motherboard drivers)
Disk tested with HD-TUNE, crystaldiskmark/info all test and benchmarks are normal.
And complete surface read/write test with Victoria: all sectors in top 2, no errors or slow sectors.

All test done when running the slow operating system aswel as disk connected to a test system (no difference in the results).


I have no idea what to think of this?
Is the drive still failing because it disappears out RESOURCE MONITOR (i thought this to be something with a cache problem maybe??), although everything else (test and transferspeed) seems perfectly ok?
Or could this be some kind of BIOS or firmware virus messing with the system whenever the "system" is the owner of the process?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

edit: Still plan on booting the disk as c-drive with a fresh install on the test system, but that has to wait till after work)

 

[boju]

Quite possible data or maybe power cable is malfunctioning. Try change them if you have spares, preferably try data cable first, maybe try replug (both ends) the one that's on it atm.

 

[DaveLTX]

Usually if your OS drive is actually disconnecting suddenly from your motherboard (whether it's due to the drive or the motherboard) it will BSOD!
However that doesn't seem like the case.
Might be looking at a weird motherboard problem now

 

[SkyNetRising]

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

What model HDD?
Is it Seagate Barracuda by any chance?
Those are not suited for installing windows on them.

Upgrade to SSD.

 

[geofelt]

Windows C drive really needs to be on a SSD. The difference is magical.
Not just for booting but for everything you do.
A ssd is some 40x faster in random I/O which is what we do most.
It will be 4-10x faster sequentially depending on the connection.

It is possible that your HDD has many relocated spare sectors that is impacting you.

If you buy a ssd with sufficient space to handle the used portion of your HDD plus extra, you can clone the hdd to the ssd for a simple conversion.

 

[TechDave]

Quite possible data or maybe power cable is malfunctioning. Try change them if you have spares, preferably try data cable first, maybe try replug (both ends) the one that's on it atm.

If this would be the problem (which was 1 of the sirst things i tested, even changed my drives around so that the c-drive went from sata-0 to sata-5), then i would also have speeds issues when transferring or doing the benchmark and complete surface testing....

Usually if your OS drive is actually disconnecting suddenly from your motherboard (whether it's due to the drive or the motherboard) it will BSOD!
However that doesn't seem like the case.
Might be looking at a weird motherboard problem now

drive is not physically disconnecting, only disappearing in resource monitor.
stays connected in device manager.
and no dma connection erros in SMART.

What model HDD?
Is it Seagate Barracuda by any chance?
Those are not suited for installing windows on them.

Upgrade to SSD.

no it is samsung spinpoint 1Tb

Windows C drive really needs to be on a SSD. The difference is magical.
Not just for booting but for everything you do.
A ssd is some 40x faster in random I/O which is what we do most.
It will be 4-10x faster sequentially depending on the connection.

It is possible that your HDD has many relocated spare sectors that is impacting you.

If you buy a ssd with sufficient space to handle the used portion of your HDD plus extra, you can clone the hdd to the ssd for a simple conversion.

of-course we all know that, that was not my question.
this system is only used as a file server with 6TB storage and printer server for my old USB A3 printer, so i have no need for an ssd disk here.
but a system boot with a clean fleshly installed windows that takes 30min to boot is ridiculously slow for a drive that has an avarage of 88-94MB/sec transfer-rate .





Because the drive is disappearing in resource monitor if think it has something to do with the cache (because resource monotor only shows drives where cashe is eneabled, but if the cache would be broken or corrupted i would expect to see errors in SMART or at least see a big perfermonce drop when doing benchmarks or transferring files....... that's my conundrum....

 

[SkyNetRising]

but a system boot with a clean fleshly installed windows that takes 30min to boot is ridiculously slow for a drive that has an avarage of 88-94MB/sec transfer-rate .

That's why people use SSDs.
Even a half modern pc with mechanical HDD will load windows 10 for several minutes.
With SSD it takes seconds.

 

[Bob.B]

Hi,

First time ever i post a question. (normally i find my answers always with a good search and/or read-up/study)
But for the moment i have myself a bit of a conundrum with an HDD or Windows.

I have this older system intel core2quad q9750 with windows (tried 7 and 10) which is terrible slow in boot and operating whenever it is writing/reading the disk.
Whenever the system is operating slow, the C-drive disappears out of the disk list in RESOURCE MONITOR and only comes back after a couple reboots.

SMART is ok, no errors.
Transferspeed when coying files to and from the C-drive are all at normal speed. (lots of small files or big file) (Explorer or 3rde party program is Owner of the copy process)
No virus in windows, already tried with fresh install (both with standard windows drivers and updated motherboard drivers)
Disk tested with HD-TUNE, crystaldiskmark/info all test and benchmarks are normal.
And complete surface read/write test with Victoria: all sectors in top 2, no errors or slow sectors.

All test done when running the slow operating system aswel as disk connected to a test system (no difference in the results).


I have no idea what to think of this?
Is the drive still failing because it disappears out RESOURCE MONITOR (i thought this to be something with a cache problem maybe??), although everything else (test and transferspeed) seems perfectly ok?
Or could this be some kind of BIOS or firmware virus messing with the system whenever the "system" is the owner of the process?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

edit: Still plan on booting the disk as c-drive with a fresh install on the test system, but that has to wait till after work)

Just to see if something shows can you run this and post a LINK to the results page?
UBM