I experience a delay, 3-10 seconds, when opening a folder or a program why ??

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Randa Ranoosh

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Aug 6, 2013
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I have ssd 850 evo 250 GB
and 3 hard drives
1-hitachi
2-wd green 2 gb
3-wd blue 1tb

sometimes when I open a folder or file in one of these drives I have a delay 3 sec why ??

desktop does not freez during the delay

it is new build
z170x gaming 5
i7 6700k
g650 seasonic
motherboard only show a0 debug code which I thing it.s good

it does not happen all the time sometimes
for example after the delay if I open the same file again or any file in the hard drive no delays

windows 10 64bit
 
Solution
Solandri
Usually it's because one of your drives has spun down to save power. The pause is while the computer waits for the drive to spin up to speed.

You can alter the spin-down behavior. Control Panel -> Power Options -> Edit Plan Settings -> Advanced -> Hard disk -> Turn off hard disk after x minutes.

Just increase the spindown time to where it happens infrequently enough that it doesn't bother you. The exception is the WD 5400 RPM drives. Those have a spindown time baked into their firmware. There's no way to alter it within Windows. There are some tools floating around which might let you alter it. But I just tell people not to buy 5400 RPM WD drives.

(Their Green drives have a fixed spin down timer of something like 5 minutes...
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D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Hi there Randa Ranoosh,

Does this happen with all the drives or with a particular one?
I guess you can do some testing. For the WD drives, you can use WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=2fd79I
You can use some third party ones as well: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

In case the tests results show that there is nothing wrong with the drives, but the issue persists, you can try swapping around cables(SATA and power ones) and SATA ports.

Yet, I think that the most important thing you need to do is to figure out whether a particular dive hangs or all of them.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD
 
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JonnyDough

JonnyDough

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Feb 24, 2007
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There are several possible explanations. First off, before you install Windows you should make sure your BIOS has a disk setting of AHCI. If it's not on AHCI it is possible to turn it on but not really recommended. Better to do a fresh install I think, once you change the setting over.

One should never ever de-fragment a solid state drive.

It's quite possibly a driver issue, or you don't have enough space. It could also be a Windows 10 driver issue. I recommend checking your SSD manufacturer's site for firmware/driver updates. It could also be your video card driver. I've seen folder hesitation due to them as well, although it would be logical to look at your drives first. Most SSDs have built in garbage collection (TRIM features) but some may have additional programs to help maintain them.

If you somehow installed your OS to your hard drives instead of your SSD (where I would choose to put it) then the lag is your drive spinning up.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Usually it's because one of your drives has spun down to save power. The pause is while the computer waits for the drive to spin up to speed.

You can alter the spin-down behavior. Control Panel -> Power Options -> Edit Plan Settings -> Advanced -> Hard disk -> Turn off hard disk after x minutes.

Just increase the spindown time to where it happens infrequently enough that it doesn't bother you. The exception is the WD 5400 RPM drives. Those have a spindown time baked into their firmware. There's no way to alter it within Windows. There are some tools floating around which might let you alter it. But I just tell people not to buy 5400 RPM WD drives.

(Their Green drives have a fixed spin down timer of something like 5 minutes. All their 5400 RPM drives like laptop drives have a fixed head parking timer of 8 seconds, which can cause 1-2 sec pauses. You can alter that annoyance with CrystalDiskInfo -> Function -> Advanced Features -> AAM/APM Control. Slide the APM slider all the way to the right until it says FEh to turn off the auto head parking. You may have to redo this after a reboot. Like I said, just save yourself some headaches and don't buy 5400 RPM WD drives.)

This isn't entirely WD's fault. For some reason Windows seems to like to check all your drives even when you're only accessing a specific one (like your SSD). I ran into the head parking one while playing games. Everything would freeze for a second every 10-30 seconds. Eventually I tracked it down to the head parking behavior of my WD HDD even though the game was installed on the SSD. Setting the APM power management mode to FEh fixes it.
 
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Solution
fudgecakes99

fudgecakes99

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Mar 17, 2014
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If you never had this delay before hand. While the other drives were also connected then it could possibly mean that you need disk defrag the main 250gb ssd. Remember DO NOT make this a regular thing. Defragging is bad, for ssd's especially a lot of them really kill the life span of the drive.

Only do this if you've had the drive for at least a year. And ONLY if you know for a fact that this delay recently happened and it didn't happen because of added hardware. A.k.a. new drives.
 
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fudgecakes99

fudgecakes99

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Mar 17, 2014
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No defraggin an ssd once. Will not destroy your ssd. Don't believe the hyperbole. It has been shown to improve read and write times. IF you don't do it often. As i said, make sure it's not on some regular schedule to defrag, and make sure you're using the appropriate tool to defrag it. You'll be fine. But thats a big IF, if you're positive that the issue isn't because you're other drives are failing if it for sure isn't a different issuse. Again only do it if you're for sure, sure the main o.s. drive is causing the issues.

Also before you start down voting peoples comments please read them thoroughly.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Defragging a SSD is pointless because the "sectors" where the file data is stored on the SSD are all virtual. Unlike a HDD where each sector maps to a specific physical location, a SSD has an intermediate table which maps the actual physical memory cells to the "sectors" the SSD reports to the computer.

It's done this way to allow the wear leveling algorithm to function. Let's say you buy a new SSD and copy a movie file to it, and never erase that movie file. After a year, the flash memory cells that movie occupies were only written to once, but the other cells have been written to (say) hundreds of times. This is a problem when the cells can only be written to a couple thousand times. So the SSD does something behind the scenes called wear leveling. It moves the movie to different physical flash cells, thus freeing up the used-once cells to be written to more frequently. But in the virtual sector table it keeps the file's location the same so the computer thinks the movie is still where it originally was.

So defragging a SSD doesn't accomplish anything. It's like a manually initiated wear-leveling cycle. A SSD reads a physically fragmented file the same way as it reads a physically sequential file - by looking up each physical cell location one after another in its virtual sector table. The only time defragging a SSD improves performance is when the drive is defective, like the Samsung 840 EVO which was having problems reading from cells which hadn't been written to in a while because the voltage had decayed. By forcibly moving the file, you're refreshing its voltage and thus side-stepping the decayed voltage problem.
 
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fudgecakes99

fudgecakes99

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Mar 17, 2014
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The only time defragging a SSD improves performance is when the drive is defective, like the Samsung 840 EVO which was having problems reading from cells which hadn't been written to in a while because the voltage had decayed. By forcibly moving the file, you're refreshing its voltage and thus side-stepping the decayed voltage problem.
Click to expand...

Though you'd want to look more at Trim then defrag, i've seen it used on older ssd's 3+ years old, and it did improve read and write times. Whether or not it was running a trim command not a defrag remains to be seen, but when the person in question used it i saw an increase of almost 200mbps read and write.
 
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fudgecakes99

fudgecakes99

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Mar 17, 2014
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The only time defragging a SSD improves performance is when the drive is defective, like the Samsung 840 EVO which was having problems reading from cells which hadn't been written to in a while because the voltage had decayed. By forcibly moving the file, you're refreshing its voltage and thus side-stepping the decayed voltage problem.
Click to expand...

Though you'd want to look more at Trim then defrag, i've seen it used on older ssd's 3+ years old, and it did improve read and write times. Whether or not it was running a trim command not a defrag remains to be seen, but when the person in question used it i saw an increase of almost 200mbps read and write.
 
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