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What the heck happened to sisoft sandra?

zephyrprime

zephyrprime

Diamond Member
I haven't used sandra in a couple of years and I needed to now to figure out why some work computers were so slow.

The current version is absolute garbage. The UI is nearly unusable and it lacks basic features like deleting result sets. What the heck happened? What can I use besides Sandra?
 
Sandra was fun when I wanted to see how much my numbers increased by overclocking my Pentium 4, or now much better my numbers were with my "Deathstars" in RAID, but I can't think of any reason I would use it for a work-related reason.

Why? Let's go through a few things:
- Drive slow? Check fragmentation and drive health.
- Entire system slow? Check memory usage in task manager.
- Too much fan noise? Check temps and operation of all fans.
- Odd popups? check for malware.
- Simple tasks take too long on a clean computer? Time for retirement.

It's been a while, but I don't see Sandra doing anything to actually help you with these issues.
 
@Ketchup
I'm surprised you cannot see how useful benchmarks are in a work setting. Isn't it completely obvious? Most of the problems in the world do not fit into the scenarios you presented and cannot be solved by the basic solutions you proposed.

For our problem, visual studio was compiling much slower than it should. It was also worse on some computers than others. Looking at the task manager and etc didn't show anything. So which one of your solutions would be applicable in this case? None of them.

After running Sandra, I found out that the drives had IO/s scores that were about 8 times lower than they should be. Sandra's ability to compare the performance of our drives to the performance scores of the same model drive from other users was super useful and allowed us the pinpoint the problem.

Now you recommended checking drive health and fragmentation in the case of slow drives. Is your solution applicable to us? No. SSD drives are automatically defragged once a month by Windows (drive fragmentation problems haven't been an issue for the average person in the last 5+ years). Multiple computers of differing ages and models are affected so drive health is not a common shared factor.

In a business setting you need to PROVE the issue or you will be ignored by the IT department. Having benchmark screenshots provides that proof - mere complaining will get ignored.
 
The only thing that is "obvious" is that you seem to have only selected certain parts of my post to read, and others to ignore.

So Sandra said your "IO/s scores that were about 8 times lower than they should be." Did I miss the part where Sandra fixed (or told you how to fix) the problem? The Default Task Manager in Windows 8 through 10 tells you what throughput each app on your computer is using, and what level of total throughput of the drive it's using. So you would probably have the same answer that Sandra got you, without the need to download and install a 3rd party program, and wait 10 minutes (or however long it takes) to run its little test.

You mentioned needing to "prove" something to your IT department. They are going to believe Windows Statistics 100x over statistics generated by a program most of them have never even heard of.
 
Out of curiosity, what was the SMART status for the drives?

If the drive was running at 1/8 speed and was not 99% filled, I'd expect it to be dying.
 
Ketchup said:
The only thing that is "obvious" is that you seem to have only selected certain parts of my post to read, and others to ignore.
Click to expand...
That's because none of the other things you said were relevent.

Ketchup said:
So Sandra said your "IO/s scores that were about 8 times lower than they should be." Did I miss the part where Sandra fixed (or told you how to fix) the problem? The Default Task Manager in Windows 8 through 10 tells you what throughput each app on your computer is using, and what level of total throughput of the drive it's using. So you would probably have the same answer that Sandra got you, without the need to download and install a 3rd party program, and wait 10 minutes (or however long it takes) to run its little test.
Click to expand...
Actually I did already look at task manager and resource manager AND process monitor before I searched for benchmarks. They revealed mysterious and paradoxical things. The cpu usage was low and disk usage was high but disk bandwidth was low. The swap file usage was high and being written to at a slow constant rate even though system memory was only at 54% utilization on a 16GB machine. Please, don't make it sound like 10 minutes is a huge productivity waste in a futile attempt to shore up your argument. In fact, investigating using windows' built in tools took HOURS and investigating using Sandra was even worse and took even longer. Sandra is a piece of junk now and nobody should use it.

Ketchup said:
You mentioned needing to "prove" something to your IT department. They are going to believe Windows Statistics 100x over statistics generated by a program most of them have never even heard of.
Click to expand...
The windows statistics revealed inconclusive data. Now that I think about it, I should have actually run the windows experience index. That would have probably provided useful information. Also the IT department actually did take action based on my statistics. Where do you get these expectations of yours when reality is so contrary to them?
 
DaveSimmons said:
Out of curiosity, what was the SMART status for the drives?

If the drive was running at 1/8 speed and was not 99% filled, I'd expect it to be dying.
Click to expand...
No smart problems on the one drive I checked. I expect the problem is actually the antivirus or something.
 
Here's a tip for you zep, when somebody says "a few things" they aren't telling you every single scenario known to exist.
 
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