250GB 7200.3 laggy?

Well, I just installed and booted up my 250gb 7200.3 with my new notebook yesterday, and despite having decent specs on my notebook, I noticed it was a bit slower than expected. After running hdtune (which 250gb 7200.3 SHOULD score the highest of all normal hard drives), I noticed a much below average score.


Can this be explained? Thanks

 

Background tasks eating up the HDD performance. TRs are getting pinged, and the burst rate is sort of not uniform.

Try terminating as many User processes using taskmgr, then run Resource Monitor and make sure the HDD is literally idle.

Is the HDD in AHCI or IDE mode ?

 

It's running in IDE. When I ran it, basically all background tasks and unnecessary tasks were shut down.

 

Also in Task Manager, go to Processes tab, Show process from all users. Then go to Services tab, click the Description column heading to sort by description. Then right-click the Superfetch service and select Disable. Also disable the Windows Search service in the same way.

EDIT: Didn't see your last post until I posted this. Still, it's a couple extra things to check.

 

Ok, then go into MSCONFIG.

General Tab > Uncheck Load Startup items.

Service tab > Check "Hide all MS Services" > Then Click "Disable All". This all MS services will run, but non MS services are disabled.

Reboot, check Resource Monitor, to see if the HDD is idle or not. When it is near idle, run HD Tune. If you changed any settings in HD Tune, then restore defaults.

 

my HDTune is now


A bit better, but I would like seeing it better still, as most people have been scoring 70+ MB/s
BTW, what causes these huge dips? I don't see anyone else having them >_<

 

Actually, its even worse than before. The dips are caused due to background services/processes accessing the HDD.

 

Your problem is Vista. Try running that in XP (which isn't as HDD heavy at idle) and you'll see the difference.

Bottom line is that you are getting the throughput you expect, but Vista is using some of it for you.

 

new score

 

I actually did run XP, and yes, XP did score a lot better. I seen others scoring fine on Vista though.

 

Actually cpu usage is still a bit high, as the HDD is in DMA mode, CPU usage should be 0.x% or 1.x%. The burst rate graph is weird as well. You can check the SMART info to see if the HDD is working properly.

View attachment 24607

EDIT: If it is scoring similar to the above graph in XP, forget about benchmarking in Vista. You'll need to do a lot of tweaking to avoid vista from accessing the HDD when idle. The HDD is probably performing as it actually should, if the scores are good in XP.

 

In XP, I get about 68-69 MB/s with 15-16ms access time. Burst rates are always around there, regardless Vista or XP.

 

I guess enabling AHCI would boost TR's by 2-3MB/s as NCQ helps boost performance when running multiple intensive tasks, and I think it will increase bandwidth from UDMA 133 to SATA-300, but don't go about enabling it. Its quite difficult to enable it without reinstalling.

 

Try disabling SuperFetch, it pings the hard drive a LOT, trying to cache often-used stuff into memory when it thinks you'll need it.

 

Also check to see if indexing is running on the drive.

 

Ah, forgot about that!