Slow to almost painful HD performance in vista.

[Robert]

Basically if I'm just on my desktop I can get stutters and sometimes app's need minutes to open. Anyway, I scanned my boot drive the other day (all apps are based on it) and it returned a few bad sectors. Now, if I unzip say an 8gb file from my D to C drive (different drives) my windows virtually dies. It's as it locks up - resumes - locks up etc.

I've just done a HDtach test and my other two drivers have a smooth slope - my boot drive has sharp drops throughout the graph:




I'm guessing this could be the issue? The drive is around 2.5-3 years old. It's a Western Digital SATA160gb. My mainboard is a Gigabyte DS3 using the ICH8 controller.

[PoDd]

AFAIK hard drive performance is a known issue in Vista. I get it all the time on my laptop and 2 different Desktops. Completely different controllers and drives. Just copying data around brings up the calculating time remaining box and often leads to a forced reboot.

I really like vista, but this is soooooo annoying. A lot of posts around the net, but no fixes. Lemme know if u dig somethin up...

PoDd

[Zak33]

Robert. What PC do you have chap? How much ram is in it? How old is the Windows install?

While the drive may be failing, it's not 100% certain. It might be a really badly fragmetted install.

It also might simply be that you have waaaay too much going on in the back ground on your PC.

[this_is_gav]

Robert, depending on the program you use to unzip, the files will still be uncompressed to the boot drive, then copied to the destination you requested. WinRAR does this, and I believe WinZip too, though it may be dependent on available hard drive space when you start the unzipping.

The only way to rectify this problem when uncompressing would be to specify a temporary path in the program you use. Using WinRAR as an example, the default is C:\DOCUME~1\%username%\LOCALS~1\Temp\, and you'll need to change it to a path on one of your other drives. Go into WinRAR, bring down the options menu and click settings. Go to the paths tab, click browse and navigate to a different path on another drive. Looking at that dialogue box, by default it should only use it when removable drives are used (such as flash drives), but some SATA drives are seen as removable, particularly on nVIDIA chipset based motherboards, and even though mine isn't seen as removable, it still uncompresses to the system drive first.

It certainly does sound like the bad sectors are causing the problem (you have the right symptoms), and if they've been flagged as bad sectors, then all I can imagine is that more are cropping up and haven't yet been flagged. Try another scan and see if more are picked up - if they are, that drive is going to be no use at all unfortunately.

AFAIK hard drive performance is a known issue in Vista. I get it all the time on my laptop and 2 different Desktops. Completely different controllers and drives. Just copying data around brings up the calculating time remaining box and often leads to a forced reboot.

Hard drive performance is fine, it's the copying which has problems, and it's particularly noticeable over a network.

General hard drive performance is just as it would be in XP, other than initially, when the indexing service is scanning your drives, and even then it will stop (after a teeny delay) when sustained hard drive access is required.

[Robert]

My system is as follows:

C2D @ 2.8
8800GTX
2gb 6400 ram
2*320gb WD drives
1*160gb WD drive

I just ran a disk check and after booting into windows I got these results:

[this_is_gav]

The spikes could just indicate other disk activity while the test is being conducted. I'd do another scan for bad sectors to see if any more have developed.

[Robert]

Are there any windows based tools which scan for bad sectors?

[Robert]

Anyone?

[grart]

Robert, the information in this may not apply but its a interesting read about issues with the WD drives and vista.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/wd-rap...view-2336.html

Hope you get the issues resolved soon, as I know they can be a nightmare.

[kalniel]

Have you tried the performance fixes from microsoft?

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=938979

and

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=938194

[Robert]

I'll try now. Could 4kb of bad sectors cause these issues?


156288192 KB total disk space.
32143124 KB in 59086 files.
52364 KB in 12604 indexes.
4 KB in bad sectors.
180136 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
123912564 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
39072048 total allocation units on disk.
30978141 allocation units available on disk.

Thanks for those links, I'll try now.

[shadowmaster]

Hi,

Have you tried HD Tune? Its quite useful in finding bad sectors. http://www.hdtune.com/

[Robert]

Tried a quick scan and it returned no errors - will do a full scan later.

One think which is odd - if I ran the scan it would tell me the transfer rate. Now it started at 50 but could down as low as 20. If I opened another app things would crawl and it'd go down to 2/3mb/s?

[Robert]

Here's another HDtach report (done when my HD was fairly idle):





As you can see this a long 32mb test.

I'm tempted to just get another drive for £30 :/

I've even had some stuttering when playing music (even though the music is on another drive) - whilst installing something on to my C: