hard drive impact on overall system performance

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Hi guys, I consider myself a decent computer tweaker, but recently
something I had learned to live with has bugged me - and I'd like to
fix it. Maybe you can help.

Let me explain: my current box is a p4 3Ghz, 1Gig of ddr2 ram, win xp.
The hard drive is 180gig SATA. It plays the latest video games, etc, no
problem. But, say I unrar a 600 meg file, that's when I can hear the
drive go in overdrive. Fair enough as it's probalby reading and writing
at the same time, but that doesn't explain why the machine slows down
to crawl when that happens.

What I don't understand is why it slows down at all. After all I'm
using only 200meg of ram, so there's no reason for swapping. Unraring a
file itself takes very little ram if any. No, it seems to be just
'using' a drive that somehow overload the bus and slows down the rest.

Now, the issue is common to all computer I ever owned or worked on
(including my good ol' 386). Basically, I build them with the fastest
components of the time, yet every single box had the hard drive as a
bottle neck to performance.

Is there a way to somehow 'fix' this issue? Or is this just the way
things work?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Steve.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

steve.anon@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi guys, I consider myself a decent computer tweaker, but recently
> something I had learned to live with has bugged me - and I'd like to
> fix it. Maybe you can help.
>
> Let me explain: my current box is a p4 3Ghz, 1Gig of ddr2 ram, win xp.
> The hard drive is 180gig SATA. It plays the latest video games, etc,
> no problem. But, say I unrar a 600 meg file, that's when I can hear
> the drive go in overdrive. Fair enough as it's probalby reading and
> writing at the same time, but that doesn't explain why the machine
> slows down to crawl when that happens.
>
> What I don't understand is why it slows down at all. After all I'm
> using only 200meg of ram, so there's no reason for swapping. Unraring
> a file itself takes very little ram if any. No, it seems to be just 'using' a
> drive that somehow overload the bus and slows down the rest.

Have you got DMA enabled ? I dont get that result myself,
even when its an rar thats got heaps of very small files in it.
That last situation does take some time, but it doesnt slow
anything else down while its happening, and thats on the
rather low horsepower test machine, only 900MHz. I can
play a captured digital video file on that machine with no
visible effect on the video play.

> Now, the issue is common to all computer I ever owned
> or worked on (including my good ol' 386). Basically, I build
> them with the fastest components of the time, yet every
> single box had the hard drive as a bottle neck to performance.

Thats normal, because hard drives are the main bottleneck
when doing something like unpacking an rar.

> Is there a way to somehow 'fix' this issue?

Maybe if you dont have DMA enabled.

> Or is this just the way things work?

> Any advice would be appreciated.