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Tools to determine if HDD is bottleneck / reason running slow?

T

tbird2340

Senior member
I just upgraded my HTPC with the following components:

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

Mobo - GIGABYTE GA-73PVM-S2H LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7100 HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Memory - CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X4096-6400C5

I kept the HDD's I was using which are:

C: Drive / Windows installation: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB Hard Drive Part # 6Y080M0 Serial-ATA

D: Drive / Storage: Western Digital Caviar 120GB Hard Drive SE Part # WD1200JB - IDE

Now, I'm upgrading from a P4 2.8 w/ HT and 1gb of RAM... It's fast, yes.. But not as fast as I think it should be and I'm thinking it's the SATA HDD.. Is there anyway to pinpoint if this may be the issue?

The reason I believe it is the issue is because it's loud as hell when it's reading and writing and seems to just be struggling..

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
 
Age of drive? If it's making an unusual noise it may well be failing - especially since it's a Maxtor - however what this usually does is cause errors and corruption not general slowdown.

Did you reinstall windows when you got the new board and processor? This is a whole new computer not an upgrade and you do need to reinstall.
 
These are going to be a pretty big bottleneck for a machine so new and powerful. You really need to get newer drives, the performance difference is astounding
 
Did you look at the Windows System Event Logs to see if there are Disk or NTFS errors? Those will slow things to a crawl and often generate a log of noise. I don't own a SINGLE Maxtor drive made since 2001 that's still functioning. They are, by far, the "most-failing" drive in the desktop PCs that I see.
 
I do see this every once in a while in the eventvwr: "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging operation."

I ran Seatools and the Western Digital tool and both pass.. WTH?
 
Harddisk2 is likely neither of your internal drives. They start with Harddisk0, then Harddisk1, then Harddisk2. Do you ever plug in a third (external?) hard drive?
 
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