WD Caviar 7200 RPM very slow

Defrag it! Check SMART status. Run WD diagnostic program on it.

Mike.

Sorry I just found this post because I forgot to check email notifications. The drive was already almost defragged when I ran the test, maybe a couple percent left. What on earth is SMART, and where do I get a diagnostic program? The least thing I expected to worry about with this comp. was hard drive speed...

Whoa...I just checked my fragmentation again and it is at 4% total and 8% file fragmentation. But that isn't the crazy thing-I just ran the test again without any defragging and now it reads at 52108 MB/s and writes at 52267 MB/s. This seems close enough to normal for me, but I do want to run those tests still just in case.

Might want to shut off all background applications. The read/write score you get only shows what the benchmark can do. Anything that's using your drive in the background will lower your score. Shut off any antivirus too.

You don't say what the size of the drive. How much of your drive is filled? Do you use a registry cleaner? Your HD might be running slower if your HD is more than 50% filled(that is just a guess). I have a friend whose drive is almost filled and it runs very slow. She was told that it doesn't matter how filled your HD is. What do you experts think?

Drives that are full do slow down. I don't know what % of it has to be full to slow it down though. My drive is 12% fragmented and 25% full. I don't notice any performance reduction. I still have a really fast boot-up and BF2 load times so I'm not gonna take the time to defrag.

For my Raid 0 Array it slows down after the 165GB mark.


The Seagate 320GB just seems to slowly go downward as it gets full.

google wd dlg and click im feeling lucky. Then download the diagnostics.

Turn off your swapfile by setting it to 0 size. Then defrag again. Then turn back on your swap file. Ideally, you should have your swap file on a 2nd drive.

I think you guys nailed the problem. Out of 298 GB of total space, 155 GB are free. Also, I had quite a few programs open at the time. I'm pretty sure my drive is behaving normally. I do have another question-is there a way to permanently erase the deleted files off the drive? More than likely 70% of the free space was used for video files at one time or another. I have gone through a lot of video projects that were moved to my other back up drive.

In other words, I want to change all the Windows-deleted files into 000000000s and 111111111111s without completely clearing the drive.

DANG IT!!! You guys are going to be the death of my computer. I installed Lifeguard Diagnostics, but when I try to start it, my computer cold reboots! Thinking it was a Windows error, I tried it again. Same thing happened! I'm feeling really uneasy now.