Hard drive Bottleneck?

kh3ldar

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Jan 18, 2014
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18,510
Hello, I'm having issues with my Laptop. It's an Acer Aspire 5741g. It's an almost 4 years laptop It used to work just fine I used to even play WoW and Warcraft 3 simultaneously on this computer. Then I bought myself a desktop and gave this to my sister but now I'm in France for a year for study reasons and I'm having problems with my laptop.

Everything loads extremely slow. And whenever I open up an application harddisk starts to make noise and the led just keeps on blinking. After sometime of using the computer becomes really slow and I have to restart to it. It even makes the surfing difficult. It can even be really difficult to open a simple text document sometimes.

I defraged the drive and it didn't make any difference. I had Intel Rapid Storage thought maybe it could be causing the problem but installing or uninstalling it didn't make any difference.

And AHCI setting is on.

Here's the Benchmark report of my disk.

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CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 Shizuku Edition x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 73.953 MB/s
Sequential Write : 73.097 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 31.187 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 34.385 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.433 MB/s [ 105.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.907 MB/s [ 221.5 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.880 MB/s [ 214.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.783 MB/s [ 191.2 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 51.4% (25.1/48.7 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2014/09/07 14:35:15

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Dxdiag :

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_BOSSlBhEWZZnr8tWFqWlHU0op8fWgBb_0UkMQU-nB0/edit?usp=sharing

Msinfo :

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oole8TL8S-ci7CNnOh0JjCtiDkPhZJaGjPQw4vFcaec/edit?usp=sharing
 
Solution
After all these HDD tests that say that the HDD is ok, I would say that the problem should be caused by something else. Have you cleaned the dust out of your laptop? Dust clogging may limit the air flow and in that way slow down or decrease the performance of some of the other components.

D_Know_WD
Hi there kh3ldar,

I would suggest you start the troubleshooting process with backing up the data that is on the drive. Usually when hard drives make weird noises, it is a sign that the drive may be failing. It is a 4 years old laptop(hard drive) after all.
Another thing you may want to do is to test the drive with a brand specific testing tool and check out it's health.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD
 

kh3ldar

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Jan 18, 2014
24
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18,510
I can't find a Hitachi Diagnostic tool out there but I installed SpeedFan and S.M.A.R.T. status is almost top notch

http://imgur.com/12zrGIy

Update : I used Seagate's software Seatools, The drive passed all the testes like : Smart Check,Short Drive Self Test,Short Generic etc..
 
When you say 'harddisk starts to make noise' you mean a loud one, or just an ordinary HDD spin up noise?
I would suggest you to run chkdsk (drive letter): /R in the Command Prompt. This command will locate bad sectors if any. It may take some time though.
Keep in mind that the HDD might not be the cause for the issues you are facing. Is it possible for you to try the HDD on another another computer? That way you will be sure whether this is causing the troubles or not.

D_Know_WD
 
After all these HDD tests that say that the HDD is ok, I would say that the problem should be caused by something else. Have you cleaned the dust out of your laptop? Dust clogging may limit the air flow and in that way slow down or decrease the performance of some of the other components.

D_Know_WD
 
Solution