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Hard Drive Woes
Darth Nathan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been having a rather frustrating issue with the hard drive in my computer recently. It's a Samsung HD502IJ drive, if that's important in any way.
Basically I'm getting what seems like really bad read speeds. When I'm playing a game like Mass Effect, World of Warcraft, Mirror's Edge, or any game based on an engine that streams textures and such from disk, there are awful pauses and stutters as the hard drive thrashes around when the engine is loading new things. The problem started back when I was using Vista, but has gotten worse since I've installed Win7, and now feels worse by the day. Chkdsk shows no bad sectors or anything like that, and I've defragmented the disk using what feels like every tool known to man. It's not any other bottleneck I can think of, as the issue is just as bad running the games on the highest and lowest settings. I've also disabled background indexing within Windows, and real-time antivirus file scanning, both had no effect.
The disk itself has been in use for nearly 3 years now, and to be honest it's quite heavy use; I use the same computer for work, study and gaming, and I practically never turn it off save of a nighttime. The only conclusion I can come to, based on all this, is that the thing is simply wearing out. I'm not averse to simply replacing it, but if I can be saved the hassle of re-installing Windows and all that then I'd be quite grateful. So, is there anything else anyone can think of that may be the root of the issue?
Edit: Ran a disk throughput test. Got 12 mb/s sequential write, 30 mb/s sequential read, and 4 mb/s random access. That is VERY bad. I guess that's why my games are stuttering. Still not sure what's causing it though.
Basically I'm getting what seems like really bad read speeds. When I'm playing a game like Mass Effect, World of Warcraft, Mirror's Edge, or any game based on an engine that streams textures and such from disk, there are awful pauses and stutters as the hard drive thrashes around when the engine is loading new things. The problem started back when I was using Vista, but has gotten worse since I've installed Win7, and now feels worse by the day. Chkdsk shows no bad sectors or anything like that, and I've defragmented the disk using what feels like every tool known to man. It's not any other bottleneck I can think of, as the issue is just as bad running the games on the highest and lowest settings. I've also disabled background indexing within Windows, and real-time antivirus file scanning, both had no effect.
The disk itself has been in use for nearly 3 years now, and to be honest it's quite heavy use; I use the same computer for work, study and gaming, and I practically never turn it off save of a nighttime. The only conclusion I can come to, based on all this, is that the thing is simply wearing out. I'm not averse to simply replacing it, but if I can be saved the hassle of re-installing Windows and all that then I'd be quite grateful. So, is there anything else anyone can think of that may be the root of the issue?
Edit: Ran a disk throughput test. Got 12 mb/s sequential write, 30 mb/s sequential read, and 4 mb/s random access. That is VERY bad. I guess that's why my games are stuttering. Still not sure what's causing it though.
Darth Nathan on
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We use ghost all the time at work, if it has troubles in the copying process it lets you know. It won't just skip something because it can't copy it.
Hard drives have pretty decent warranty coverage. See if you can't get it replaced by whoever made it.
Also how much ram you got?
If you have little RAM (1 gig or less) and your PC is using the swap file a whole lot that can compound the issue.
Check the system log in windows to see if the drive is throwing up errors.
If you still wanna check the disk I would search for and burn Samsung's HDD utility HUTIL to a CD. Then boot into it and let it scan. This should give you more details.